Stacked magnetic resonators for MRI RF coils decoupling

• DOI: 10.1016/j.jmr.2016.11.012
• Publication Date: 2016-11-21T16:28:41Z
• Authors: Elodie Georget; Michel Luong; Alexandre Vignaud; Eric Giacomini; Edouard Chazel; Guillaume Ferrand; Alexis Amadon; Franck Mauconduit; Stefan Enoch; Gérard Tayeb; Nicolas Bonod; Cyril Poupon; Redha Abdeddaim
• Keywords: [SPI.ELEC]Engineering Sciences [physics]/Electromagnetism; 03 medical and health sciences; 0302 clinical medicine; [SPI.ELEC] Engineering Sciences [physics]/Electromagnetism; passive decoupling; linear resonator; phased array coil; high-field RF coils; metamaterial

Parallel transmission is a very promising method to tackle B1+ field inhomogeneities at ultrahigh field in magnetic resonant imaging (MRI). This technique is however limited by the mutual coupling between the radiating elements. Here we propose to solve this problem by designing a passive magneto-electric resonator that we here refer to as stacked magnetic resonator (SMR). By combining numerical and experimental methodologies, we prove that this novelty passive solution allows an efficient decoupling of elements of a phased-array coil. We demonstrate the ability of this technique to significantly reduce by more than 10dB the coupling preserving the quality of images compared to ideally isolated linear resonators on a spherical salty agar gel phantom in a 7T MRI scanner.