Purpose
Development of a novel quadrature inductively driven transceive wireless coil for breast MRI at 1.5 T.
Methods
A quadrature wireless coil (HHMM‐coil) design has been developed as a combination of two linearly polarized coils: a pair of ‘metasolenoid’ coils (MM‐coil) and a pair of Helmholtz‐type coils (HH‐coil). The MM‐coil consisted of an array of split‐loop resonators. The HH‐coil design included two electrically connected flat spirals. All the wireless coils were coupled to a whole‐body birdcage coil. The HHMM‐coil was studied and compared to the linear coils in terms of transmit and SAR efficiencies via numerical simulations. A prototype of HHMM‐coil was built and tested on a 1.5 T scanner in a phantom and healthy volunteer. We also proposed an extended design of the HHMM‐coil and compared its performance to a dedicated breast array.
Results
Numerical simulations of the HHMM‐coil with a female voxel model have shown more than a 2.5‐fold increase in transmit efficiency and a 1.7‐fold enhancement of SAR efficiency compared to the linearly polarized coils. Phantom and in vivo imaging showed good agreement with the numerical simulations. Moreover, the HHMM‐coil provided good image quality, visualizing all areas of interest similar to a multichannel breast array with a 32% reduction in signal‐to‐noise ratio.
Conclusion
The proposed quadrature HHMM‐coil allows the normalB1+$$ {\mathrm{B}}_1^{+} $$‐field to be significantly better focused in the region‐of‐interest compared to the linearly polarized coils. Thus, the HHMM‐coil provides high‐quality breast imaging on a 1.5 T scanner using a whole‐body birdcage coil for transmit and receive.
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