2 research outputs found
Compression of volume-surface integral equation matrices via Tucker decomposition for magnetic resonance applications
In this work, we propose a method for the compression of the coupling matrix
in volume\hyp surface integral equation (VSIE) formulations. VSIE methods are
used for electromagnetic analysis in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
applications, for which the coupling matrix models the interactions between the
coil and the body. We showed that these effects can be represented as
independent interactions between remote elements in 3D tensor formats, and
subsequently decomposed with the Tucker model. Our method can work in tandem
with the adaptive cross approximation technique to provide fast solutions of
VSIE problems. We demonstrated that our compression approaches can enable the
use of VSIE matrices of prohibitive memory requirements, by allowing the
effective use of modern graphical processing units (GPUs) to accelerate the
arising matrix\hyp vector products. This is critical to enable numerical MRI
simulations at clinical voxel resolutions in a feasible computation time. In
this paper, we demonstrate that the VSIE matrix\hyp vector products needed to
calculate the electromagnetic field produced by an MRI coil inside a numerical
body model with mm voxel resolution, could be performed in
seconds in a GPU, after compressing the associated coupling matrix from TB to MB.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figure
Noninvasive estimation of electrical properties from magnetic resonance measurements via global Maxwell tomography and match regularization
Objective: In this paper, we introduce global Maxwell tomography (GMT), a novel volumetric technique that estimates electric conductivity and permittivity by solving an inverse scattering problem based on magnetic resonance measurements. Methods: GMT relies on a fast volume integral equation solver, MARIE, for the forward path, and a novel regularization method, match regularization, designed specifically for electrical property estimation from noisy measurements. We performed simulations with three different tissue-mimicking numerical phantoms of different complexity, using synthetic transmit sensitivity maps with realistic noise levels as the measurements. We performed an experiment at 7 T using an eight-channel coil and a uniform phantom. Results: We showed that GMT could estimate relative permittivity and conductivity from noisy magnetic resonance measurements with an average error as low as 0.3% and 0.2% respectively, over the entire volume of the numerical phantom. Voxel resolution did not affect GMT performance and is currently limited only by the memory of the graphics processing unit. In the experiment, GMT could estimate electrical properties within 5% of the values measured with a dielectric probe. Conclusion: This work demonstrated the feasibility of GMT with match regularization, suggesting that it could be effective for accurate in vivo electrical property estimation. GMT does not rely on any symmetry assumption for the electromagnetic field, and can be generalized to estimate also the spin magnetization, at the expense of increased computational complexity. Significance: GMT could provide insight into the distribution of electromagnetic fields inside the body, which represents one of the key ongoing challenges for various diagnostic and therapeutic applications