At certain frequencies, when the human head becomes a resonant structure, the power absorbed by the head and neck, when the body is exposed to a vertically polarized plane wave propagating from front to back, becomes significantly larger than would ordinarily be expected from its shadow cross section. This has possible implications in the study of the biological effects of electromagnetic fields. Additionally the frequencies at which these resonances occur are not readily predicted by simple approximations of the head in isolation. In order to determine these resonant conditions an anatomically based model of the whole human body has been used, with the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) algorithm to accurately determine field propagation, specific absorption rate (SAR) distributions and power absorption in both the whole body and the head region (head and neck). This paper shows that resonant frequencies can be determined using two methods. The first is by use of the accurate anatomically based model (with heterogeneous tissue properties) and secondly using a model built from parallelepiped sections (for the torso and legs), an ellipsoid for the head and a cylinder for the neck. This approximation to the human body is built from homogeneous tissue the equivalent of two-thirds the conductivity and dielectric constant of that of muscle. An IBM SP-2 supercomputer together with a parallel FDTD code has been used to accommodate the large problem size. We find resonant frequencies for the head and neck at 207 MHz and 193 MHz for the isolated and grounded conditions, with absorption cross sections that are respectively 3.27 and 2.62 times the shadow cross section.
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