Bio-inspired surface coil for small-bore MRI at 15.2 T

TL;DR

This paper introduces a bio-inspired flower petal pattern surface coil for ultra-high-field MRI at 15.2 T, demonstrating improved performance and image quality in phantom tests compared to traditional circular coils.

Contribution

It presents a novel flower petal coil design inspired by biological structures, outperforming traditional circular coils in phantom imaging at 15.2 T.

Findings

Phantom images show no degradation from petal mutual inductance.

SNR of 31.16 achieved with the new coil.

Feasibility demonstrated at 15.2 T with conventional pulse sequences.

Abstract

We looked for a biological analogy to developed an improved surface coil to acquire magnetic resonance images. Nature offers engineering solutions that can be exploited to improve the performance of devices, such as MRI RF coils. In this paper, we proposed a coil layout based on flower petal patterns for UHF MRI at 15.2 T. This particular configuration offers the possibility to use a different number of petals and shapes. The petal resonator coil and the magnetron coil have similar layouts, which have proved to outperform the popular circular coil. Phantom images were acquired with our coil prototype to demonstrate it feasibility. These phantom images show no image degradation caused by the mutual inductance of the adjacent petals in both orientations. The SNR was also calculated using the image data and giving 31.16. Phantom images showed the coil viability and compatibility with conventional pulse sequences at 15.2 T. It still remains to investigate whether this bio-inspired surface coil is able to outperformed the popular circular coil.