On the Role of Demagnetizing Tensors in Arbitrary Orientations of General Ellipsoid: Implications for MRI Safety Assessment

TL;DR

This paper investigates how demagnetizing tensors for ellipsoids behave under arbitrary rotations, with implications for MRI safety, by validating tensor rotation methods and exploring their effects on force, torque, and saturation fields.

Contribution

It demonstrates the validity of rotating demagnetizing tensors derived from Poisson solutions and generalizes force and torque calculations for arbitrary ellipsoid orientations in MRI safety assessments.

Findings

Exact match of force and torque calculations with standard rotation methods.

Connection between demagnetizing tensor behavior and MRI magic angle.

Approximate methods perform well across spheroid shapes.

Abstract

This work explores the behaviour of demagnetizing tensors for general ellipsoids under arbitrary rotations in homogeneous magnetic fields. The work is motivated by the concerns in magnetic resonance imaging safety and their practical evaluation in clinical environments. Whereas demagnetizing tensor is a well-defined concept in the principal axes, its transformation under three-dimensional reorientation is often overlooked - a justifiable omission for solutions derived from Poisson equation, where the tensor can be directly rotated. However, this does not hold for common approximations, where such tensor is not explicitly defined. This work demonstrates the validity of directly rotating the orthogonal basis solutions, derived from Poissons equation, and uses the procedure to evaluate a practical approximation, based on orthogonal area-projections. The tensor rotation approach is also applied to generalize force and torque calculations for ellipsoids under three-dimensional re-orientation. The results show an exact match for translation force and torque when compared to the standard single axis rotation. Additionally, a unique connection to the well-known MRI magic angle is found as the point of convergence for prolate spheroid aspect ratios while solving the corresponding saturation field magnitudes. Finally, the evaluated approximate method was demonstrated to perform fairly across prolate and oblate spheroids. Similar approximations might extend to irregular shapes, but numerical validation would likely remain preferable due to the complexity of internal field distributions.