A comparison of the BCG-FFT and FD-TD methods for the 3-D human head absorption problem

There is a steadily increasing interest in modeling the interaction of electromagnetic (EM) radiation and complex biological tissues. The accurate modeling of near-field EM propagation has applications ranging from antenna design for wireless communications to MRI coil design for medical imaging applications. We present a comparison of two distinct methods that have proven to be of great value for solving highly inhomogeneous EM absorption problems. The biconjugate-gradient fast-Fourier-transform (BCG-FFT) method and the finite difference time-domain (FD-TD) method are both capable of solving the 3-D human head absorption problem. However, the choice of methods is shown to be dependent on the particular application.