Speaker: Craig Goodrich

Title: Peripheral Nerve Stimulation Properties of Head and Body Gradient Coils of Various Sizes

Reference: Magnetic Resonance in Medicine 50:5058 (2003)

Authors: Beibei Zhang, Yi-Fen Yen, Blaine A. Chronik, Graeme C. McKinnon?, Daniel J. Schaefer, and Brian K. Rutt

Peripheral nerve stimulation (PNS) caused by time-varying magnetic fields has been studied both theoretically and ex- perimentally. A human volunteer study performed on three different body-size gradient coils and one head-size gradient coil is presented in this work. The experimental results were used to generate average PNS threshold parameters for the tested gradient systems. It was found that the average stim- ulation threshold increases while gradient-region-of-unifor- mity size decreases. In addition, linear relationships between PNS parameters and diameter of homogeneous gradient spherical volume (DSV) were discovered: SRmin and Gmin both vary inverse linearly with DSV. More importantly, the chronaxie value was found to vary inversely linearly with the DSV. This finding indicates that, contrary to the general un- derstanding, the parameter "chronaxie" in the commonly ac- cepted simple stimulation models cannot be considered to be a single-value, nerve-specific constant. A modified linear model for gradient-induced PNS based on these results was developed, which may permit, for the first time, the general prediction of nerve stimulation properties for gradient coils of arbitrary linear region dimension.