RF coil safety validation with a 3D SAR measurement setup

We implemented a framework to validate the RF safety of MRI coils experimentally using a phantom in our RF safety lab which supports coil excitation using up to 16 individually-controlled power amplifiers. A 3D measurement setup and a dosimetric probe were used to map the spatial distribution of the specific absorption rate (SAR). To demonstrate the accuracy of the framework, we compared the simulated and measured 10 g averaged SAR of a rectangular loop element and an 8-channel transmit/receive head coil. We obtained quantitative agreements with 7.8% and 11.6% root-mean-squared error for the loop element and head coil respectively.