Purpose: Many of today's MR coils are still somehow rigid and inflexible in their size and shape as they are intentionally designed to image a specific anatomical region and to fit a wide range of patients. Adaptive coils on the other hand, are intended to follow a one-size-fits-all approach, by fitting different shapes, and sizes. Such coils improve the SNR for a wide range of subjects by an optimal fit to the anatomical region of interest, and in addition allow an increased handling and patient comfort as one MRI receive-coil is maintained instead of multiple. Material and Methods: To overcome the SNR losses by non-fitting and thus poorly loaded RF coils, we propose a stretchable antenna design. Each loop has the ability to reversibly stretch up to 100% of its original size, to be anatomically adaptive to different shapes and sizes, and therefore make the coil usable for a wide patient population. Besides the mechanical challenge to find a robust but flexible conductive material, various other problems like frequency and matching shifts affect the SNR. Through bench measurements and MR Imaging at 1.5 T, we investigated different stretchable conductor materials, that fit the defined requirements. Finally, a rigid reference coil and an adaptive 6-channel array for knee imaging at 1.5 Tesla were developed to investigate the potential improvement in SNR. Results: The material tests identified two potentially useful materials: Highly ductile copper and a silver-plated stranded copper wire. Although, the adaptivity causes a frequency shift of the resonance frequency, which entails in variations of the impedance that each coil presents to its connected pre-amplifier, there are strategies to mitigate these effects. The adaptive array prototype made of partly-stretchable loops, showed an improved SNR of up to 100% in 20 mm depth from the phantom surface, and therefore demonstrates the effectiveness of adaptive coils.

Flexible radiofrequency coils for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have garnered attention in research and industrial communities because they provide improved accessibility and performance and can accommodate a range of anatomic postures. Most recent flexible coil developments involve customized conductors or substrate materials and/or target applications at 3 T or above. In contrast, we set out to design a flexible coil based on an off-the-shelf conductor that is suitable for operation at 0.55 T (23.55 MHz). Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) degradation can occur in such an environment because the resistance of the coil conductor can be significant with respect to the sample. We found that resonating a commercially available RG-223 coaxial cable shield with a lumped capacitor while the inner conductor remained electrically floating gave rise to a highly effective “cable coil.” A 10-cm diameter cable coil was flexible enough to wrap around the knee, an application that can benefit from flexible coils, and had similar conductor loss and SNR as a standard-of-reference rigid copper coil. A two-channel cable coil array also provided good SNR robustness against geometric variability, outperforming a two-channel coaxial coil array by 26 and 16% when the elements were overlapped by 20–40% or gapped by 30–50%, respectively. A 6-channel cable coil array was constructed for 0.55 T knee imaging. Incidental cartilage and bone pathologies were clearly delineated in T1- and T2-weighted turbo spin echo images acquired in 3–4 min with the proposed coil, suggesting that clinical quality knee imaging is feasible in an acceptable examination timeframe. Correcting for T1, the SNR measured with the cable coil was approximately threefold lower than that measured with a 1.5 T state-of-the-art 18-channel coil, which is expected given the threefold difference in main magnetic field strength. This result suggests that the 0.55 T cable coil conductor loss does not deleteriously impact SNR, which might be anticipated at low field.

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