# Assessing RF heating of deep brain stimulation implants in high-field open-bore MRI systems

> **NIH NIH R03** · NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $79,417

## Abstract

Project Summary
There is a steady growth in the use of implantable electronic devices for therapeutic applications in the U.S.
and globally. The neurostimulation devices market was valued at $3.68 billion in 2015, with the fastest annual
growth in deep brain stimulators (DBS) at 12.7%. This rapid increase in clinical applications of DBS parallels
the large availability and need for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). About 80% of patients with an implanted
neurostimulation device will require an MRI within five years of implantation, but safety concerns due to RF
heating of implants prevent most such patients from receiving these scans. Although there are few MR-
conditional DBS devices available, they require restrictive imaging conditions that have proven hard to
implement. This limitation has led almost two-third of hospitals to refrain from performing MRI on patients with
DBS implants. The current MR labeling of DBS devices, as well as all MRI studies on the radiofrequency
heating of conductive implants has been limited to horizontal (closed-bore) MRI systems. No literature exists
on the safety of DBS imaging in vertical MRI scanners, which generate a fundamentally different electric and
magnetic field distribution and are now available at 1.2 T field strength capable of high-resolution structural and
functional studies. To make MRI accessible to patients with DBS devices, the proposed experiments will test
the hypothesis that vertical MRI systems with a 90° rotated radiofrequency field orientation generate
substantially less heating and image artifact around leads of DBS devices with realistic clinical configurations.
In preliminary studies, a commercially available vertical coil (Oasis, Hitachi) generated 20-fold less local
specific absorption rate of energy deposition at the tips of DBS leads in four patient-derived realistic models of
isolated leads and fully implanted DBS systems compared to the standard birdcage body coil. These results, if
verified in larger patient cohorts and validated experimentally, will open the door to a plethora of structural and
functional MRI applications to guide DBS therapy. The proposed experiments will develop a virtual family of
patient body models (five tissue classes) implanted with DBS devices, perform numerical simulations to
calculate radiofrequency heating during MRI in 1.2 T vertical systems (unlabeled) and compare to horizontal
systems at 1.5 T (labeled) at different imaging landmarks, verify simulation results using anthropomorphic
phantoms, and use verified computational models to develop lookup tables to select imaging parameters that
constraint RF heating to less than what happens in a fever (1-3°C). Completion of this work will provide, for the
first time, a quantitative measure of temperature rise in tissue during MRI of patients with implanted leads in
high-field open-bore MRI systems. Open bore MRI was developed to facilitate interventional applications,
offering an ideal platform for MR-gui...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10127642
- **Project number:** 5R03EB029587-02
- **Recipient organization:** NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Laleh Golestani Rad
- **Activity code:** R03 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $79,417
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2020-04-01 → 2023-01-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10127642

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10127642, Assessing RF heating of deep brain stimulation implants in high-field open-bore MRI systems (5R03EB029587-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10127642. Licensed CC0.

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