A new medical lead for various MRI systems

Radio Frequency (RF) coils in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) systems interact with a patient's tissues, resulting in the absorption of RF energy by the tissues. The presence of an electrically conducting medical implant may concentrate the RF energy and causes tissue heating near the implant devices. Here we present a novel design for a medical lead to reduce this undesired heating. Specific Absorption Rate (SAR), an indicator of heating, was calculated. Remcom XFdtd software was used to calculate the peak SAR distribution (lg and 10 g) in a realistic model of the human body. The model contained a medical lead that was exposed to RF magnetic fields at 64 MHz (1.5 T MRI), 128 MHz (3 T MRI) and 300 MHz (7 T MRI) using a model of an MR birdcage body coil. Our results demonstrate that, our proposed design of adding nails to the medical lead can significantly reduce the SAR for different MRI systems.