Towards high precision thermal based RF safety assessment with cardiac triggered MR thermometry

To validate thermal simulations, high precision in vivo MR thermometry measurements are required. We demonstrate in vivo MR thermometry in the upper leg at 7T, where we improved the precision of our temperature measurements by using cardiac triggering with a PPU. The standard deviation in baseline measurements without RF heating decreased more than two-fold (0.1 ° C with PPU compared to 0.21 ° C without PPU). We were able to perform reproducible MR thermometry measurements in vivo, with local temperature increases of less than 1 °C.