Image acceleration in parallel magnetic resonance imaging by means of metamaterial magnetoinductive lenses

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that metamaterial magnetoinductive lenses can enhance the localization of the field of view in parallel MRI, leading to improved image acceleration and higher signal-to-noise ratio.

Contribution

The study introduces and analyzes magnetoinductive lenses based on capacitively-loaded rings as a novel method to improve MRI image acceleration.

Findings

Magnetoinductive lenses provide higher FOV localization.

MI lenses improve the signal-to-noise ratio in MRI.

Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of MI lenses in accelerating MRI images.

Abstract

Parallel magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a technique of image acceleration which takes advantage of the localization of the field of view (FOV) of coils in an array. In this letter we show that metamaterial lenses based on capacitively-loaded rings can provide higher localization of the FOV. Several lens designs are systematically analyzed in order to find the structure providing higher signal-to-noise-ratio. The magnetoinductive (MI) lens is find to be the optimum structure and an experiment is developed to show it. The ability of the fabricated MI lenses to accelerate the image is quantified by means of the parameter known in the MRI community as g-factor.