SAR distributions in a healthy female adult head as a result of a radiating vertical dipole antenna (frequency 915 MHz) representing a hand-held mobile phone have been computed for three different resolutions: 2 mm, 1 mm and 0.4 mm. The extremely high resolution of 0.4 mm was obtained with our quasistatic zooming technique, which is briefly described in this paper.

For an effectively transmitted power of 0.25 W, the maximum averaged SAR values in both cubic- and arbitrary-shaped volumes are, respectively, about 1.72 and 2.55 W kg⁻¹ for 1 g and 0.98 and 1.73 W kg⁻¹ for 10 g of tissue. These numbers do not vary much (<8%) for the different resolutions, indicating that SAR computations at a resolution of 2 mm are sufficiently accurate to describe the large-scale distribution.

However, considering the detailed SAR pattern in the head, large differences may occur if high-resolution computations are performed rather than low-resolution ones. These deviations are caused by both increased modelling accuracy and improved anatomical description in higher resolution simulations. For example, the SAR profile across a boundary between tissues with high dielectric contrast is much more accurately described at higher resolutions. Furthermore, low-resolution dielectric geometries may suffer from loss of anatomical detail, which greatly affects small-scale SAR distributions. Thus, for strongly inhomogeneous regions high-resolution SAR modelling is an absolute necessity.