Fast Electromagnetic Analysis of MRI Transmit RF Coils Based on Accelerated Integral Equation Methods

A fast frequency domain full-wave electromagnetic simulation method is introduced for the analysis of MRI coils loaded with the realistic human body models. The approach is based on integral equation methods decomposed into two domains: 1) the RF coil array and shield, and 2) the human body region where the load is placed. The analysis of multiple coil designs is accelerated by introducing the precomputed magnetic resonance Green functions (MRGFs), which describe how the particular body model used responds to the incident fields from external sources. These MRGFs, which are precomputed once for a given body model, can be combined with any integral equation solver and reused for the analysis of many coil designs. This approach provides a fast, yet comprehensive, analysis of coil designs, including the port S-parameters and the electromagnetic field distribution within the inhomogeneous body. The method solves the full-wave electromagnetic problem for a head array in few minutes, achieving a speed up of over 150 folds with root mean square errors in the electromagnetic field maps smaller than 0.4% when compared to the unaccelerated integral equation-based solver. This enables the characterization of a large number of RF coil designs in a reasonable time, which is a first step toward an automatic optimization of multiple parameters in the design of transmit arrays, as illustrated in this paper, but also receive arrays.