Visible Human Project® female surface based computational phantom (Nelly) for radio-frequency safety evaluation in MRI coils

Quantitative modeling of specific absorption rate and temperature rise within the human body during 1.5 T and 3 T MRI scans is of clinical significance to ensure patient safety. This work presents justification, via validation and comparison, of the potential use of the Visible Human Project (VHP) derived Computer Aided Design (CAD) female full body computational human model for non-clinical assessment of female patients of age 50–65 years with a BMI of 30–36 during 1.5 T and 3 T based MRI procedures. The initial segmentation validation and four different application examples have been identified and used to compare to numerical simulation results obtained using VHP Female computational human model under the same or similar conditions. The first application example provides a simulation-to-simulation validation while the latter three application examples compare with measured experimental data. Given the same or similar coil settings, the computational human model generates meaningful results for SAR, B1 field, and temperature rise when used in conjunction with the 1.5 T birdcage MRI coils or at higher frequencies corresponding to 3 T MRI. Notably, the deviation in temperature rise from experiment did not exceed 2.75° C for three different heating scenarios considered in the study with relative deviations of 10%, 25%, and 20%. This study provides a reasonably systematic validation and comparison of the VHP-Female CAD v.3.0–5.0 surface-based computational human model starting with the segmentation validation and following four different application examples.