MRI coil design with volumetric trough-shaped coil elements

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-9429634-B2
Application number	US-93668209-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Apr 7, 2009
Priority date	Apr 7, 2008
Publication date	Aug 30, 2016
Grant date	Aug 30, 2016

Abstract

A coil for a magnetic resonance imaging device consists of multiple coil elements arranged about an imaging space. Each coil element comprise radiating structures oriented at an angle to a tangent of the imaging space. Angling the radiating structures reduces mutual coupling between coil elements and enhances the penetration of the radio frequency field to the imaging space.

First claim

The invention claimed is:

1. A transmit and/or receive radio frequency coil, the coil comprising:
an RF field generator, said RF field generator generating an RF field within a substantially cylindrical measuring space, said RF field generator comprising:
a plurality of volumetric trough-shaped coil elements, enclosing said cylindrical measuring space,
each volumetric trough-shaped coil element having, as part of its structure, two oppositely spaced apart, elongated radiating structures and two end elements connected between facing ends of said elongated radiating structures, with each end element generating capacitive coupling between said two radiating structures,
said capacitive coupling being selected in order to tune each volumetric trough-shaped coil element to a desired resonant frequency and impedance,
wherein each radiating structure is aligned at an angle α relative to a tangent of said cylindrical measuring space, said angle α being selected in order to increase an RF field at a center of said cylindrical measuring space and in order to regulate a mutual decoupling between neighbouring volumetric trough-shaped coil elements; and
a plurality of counter wound inductors disposed between adjacent volumetric trough-shaped coil elements in order to mutually decouple said volumetric trough-shaped coil elements from each other.

2. The transmit and/or receive radio frequency coil of claim 1 , wherein the coil is a magnetic resonance imaging coil.

3. The transmit and/or receive radio frequency coil of claim 1 ,
wherein said volumetric trough-shaped coil elements are arranged around a circumference of said cylindrical measuring space with a spacing between volumetric trough-shaped coil elements of 360°/N, where N is the number of coil elements.

4. The transmit and/or receive radio frequency coil of claim 1 ,
wherein said elongated radiating structures are rectangular.

5. The transmit and/or receive radio frequency coil of claim 4 , wherein a long side of said rectangular elongated radiating structures is a parallel to a longitudinal axis of said cylindrical measuring space.

6. The transmit and/or receive radio frequency coil of claim 1 ,
wherein each volumetric trough-shaped coil element has inductance and capacitance elements that are incorporated into each volumetric trough-shaped coil element.

7. The transmit and/or receive radio frequency coil of claim 6 ,
wherein said inductance and capacitance elements are oriented at an angle in order to enhance radio frequency field penetration into said cylindrical measuring space.

8. The transmit and/or receive radio frequency coil of claim 1 ,
wherein each of said radiating structures has a form of a bent or curved shape.

9. The transmit and/or receive radio frequency coil of claim 1 ,
wherein each of said radiating structures is constructed on a dielectric substrate, with said dielectric substrate having a form of a bent and/or curved shape.

10. The transmit and/or receive radio frequency coil of claim 3 , wherein N=8.

11. The transmit and/or receive radio frequency coil of claim 1 , wherein 62.5°≦α≦95°.

Assignees

• Crozier Stuart
• Li Bing Keong
• Liu Feng
• Weber Ewald
• Univ Queensland

Inventors

• Crozier Stuart
• Li Bing Keong
• Liu Feng
• Weber Ewald

Classifications

• G01R33/5611

  Parallel magnetic resonance imaging, e.g. sensitivity encoding [SENSE], simultaneous acquisition of spatial harmonics [SMASH], unaliasing by Fourier encoding of the overlaps using the temporal dimension [UNFOLD], k-t-broad-use linear acquisition speed-up technique [k-t-BLAST], k-t-SENSE (structural details of arrays of sub-coils G01R33/3415) · CPC title

• G01R33/3415

  comprising arrays of sub-coils {, i.e. phased-array coils with flexible receiver channels} · CPC title

• G01R33/365

  Decoupling of multiple RF coils wherein the multiple RF coils have the same function in MR, e.g. decoupling of a receive coil from another receive coil in a receive coil array, decoupling of a transmission coil from another transmission coil in a transmission coil array · CPC title

• G01R33/34007

  Manufacture of RF coils, e.g. using printed circuit board technology; additional hardware for providing mechanical support to the RF coil assembly or to part thereof, e.g. a support for moving the coil assembly relative to the remainder of the MR system · CPC title

• G01R33/34046 Primary

  Volume type coils, e.g. bird-cage coils; Quadrature bird-cage coils; Circularly polarised coils · CPC title