Two-Slotted Surface Coil Array for Magnetic Resonance Imaging at 4 Tesla

摘要

Arrays of antennas have been widely accepted for magnetic resonance imagingapplications due to their high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) over large volumes of interest. A newsurface coil based on the magnetron tube and called slotted surface coil, has been recentlyintroduced by our group. This coil design experimentally demonstrated a significantimprovement over the circular-shaped coil when used in the receive-only mode. The slottedcoils formed a two-sheet structure with a 90° separation and each coil had 6 circular slots.Numerical simulations were performed using the finite element method for this coil design tostudy the behaviour of the array magnetic field. Then, we developed a two-coil array for brainmagnetic resonance imaging to be operated at the resonant frequency of 170 MHz in thetransceiver mode. Phantom images were acquired with our coil array and standard pulsesequences on a research-dedicated 4 Tesla scanner. Numerical simulations demonstrated thatelectromagnetic interaction between the coil elements is negligible, and that the magnetic fieldshowed a good uniformity. In vitro images showed the feasibility of this coil array for standardpulses for high field magnetic resonance imaging.