Comparison of magnetically induced elf fields in humans computed by FDTD and scalar potential FD codes

This paper presents a comparison of the magnetically induced low frequency electric and current density fields within an anatomically realistic model of the full human body, as computed using two different numerical techniques. The first method is a full wave quasi-static finite-difference time-domain method. The second method is based on a representation of the first-order internal electric field in terms of a scalar conduction potential plus a vector potential for the lowest-order applied magnetic field. Each code was used to calculate the fields, induced by three orthogonal uniform magnetic fields, in a 7.2 mm-resolution human full-body model. Three-dimensional correlation coefficients of better than 99.8% were observed between results computed by the two methods. Individual edge electric fields typically agree to 3 significant digits.