A wireless bilateral transceiver coil based on volume decoupled resonators for a clinical MR mammography

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel wireless MR coil with volume decoupled resonators, demonstrating improved transmit efficiency and receive sensitivity over traditional coupled designs through numerical and experimental validation, including in vivo testing.

Contribution

It presents the first wireless coil with decoupled volume resonators, addressing coupling issues and enhancing performance in clinical breast MRI applications.

Findings

Decoupled resonators increase transmit efficiency by at least 24%.

Experimental results confirm improved receive sensitivity.

In vivo studies validate practical benefits.

Abstract

Wireless radio frequency coils provide a promising solution for clinical MR applications due to several benefits, such as cable-free connection and compatibility with MR platforms of different vendors. Namely, for the purpose of clinical high-field human breast imaging several wireless transceiver coils are known to the date, those operational principle is based on inductive coupling with a body coil. These coils are commonly consist of a several volume resonators to perform bilateral breast imaging. Due to the electrically close location of volume resonators, strong inductive coupling is observed, resulting in the occurrence of hybrid modes. In principle, MR imaging using one of the hybrid modes is possible provided by the homogeneity of a B+ distribution. However, the question of influence of volume resonators coupling on wireless coil transmit efficiency and receive sensitivity was not previously studied. By this work, we performed study to understand this issue. The first wireless coil with decoupled resonators is developed, evaluated numerically and experimentally including in vivo study on healthy volunteers. According to the obtained results, transmit efficiency and receive sensitivity of a pair of decoupled Helmholtz resonators is at least 24% higher than for a pair of coupled resonators.