Heating risk evaluation for MRI on patients with hip, knee and shoulder arthroplasty

The script is intended to provide an estimation of the RF and GC exposing conditions following the execution of realistic MR pulse sequences. Starting from electromagnetic simulation results, which can be supplied by the user as described below and involve any generic metallic implant placed in an homogeneous phantom, the script is able to process the input data to provide estimation of SAR and temperature increase following the RF and GC interactions with the implant respectively. Whole-body SAR and 10 g maximum local SAR are averaged both over the MR pulse sequence duration and a reference time (e.g. 6 minutes) to represent RF exposing indicators. Similarly, the temperature increase due to the eddy currents induced within the implant by the switching GCs, is computed at the end of the sequence execution and at steady-state to represent the GC exposing indicator.

The whole package is composed of six Python files: main.py, compAlpha90.py, fillXlsFile.py, GC_comp.py, RF_comp.py, RFPulseEnergy.py. Each file performs specific operations which are managed by the main.py module. In addition to the six Python files, the package come along with four directories: RF, GC, Results, Template. These directories are used to collect the RF input data, the GC input data, the results provided by the script and the .xlsx template file respectively.