Aiping Yao, Earl Zastrow, and Niels Kuster, Radio Science, online 20 April 2018, DOI: 10.1029/2017RS006433
Small (mm size) distal electrodes of active medical implants can cause localized radio frequency (RF)-induced power deposition with extreme spatial gradient (5–6 dB/mm). We propose a method that aims to improve the accuracy of the traditional experimental evaluation, which relies solely on hardware instrumentation. A numerically derived local deposition distribution is used to assist the estimation of power deposition. The method was successfully validated against numerical simulations, considering three different generic implants with a single electrode. The estimation of deposited power in the region surrounding the implant electrodes by means of the proposed method was validated, with less than 1 dB (30%) of uncertainty.
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