Comparisons between the 35 mm Quadrature Surface Resonator at 300 K and the 40 mm High-Temperature Superconducting Surface Resonator at 77 K in a 3T MRI Imager

Abstract

This study attempts to compare the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the 40 mm High-Temperature Superconducting (HTS) surface resonator at 77 K and the 35 mm commercial quadrature (QD) surface resonator at 300 K in a 3 Tesla (T) MRI imager. To aquire images for the comparison, we implemented a phantom experiment using the 40 mm diameter Bi2Sr2Ca2Cu3Ox (Bi-2223) HTS surface resonator, the 35 mm commercial QD surface resonator and the 40 mm professionally-made copper surface resonator. The HTS surface resonator at 77 K provided a 1.43-fold SNR gain over the QD surface resonator at 300 K and provided a 3.84-fold SNR gain over the professionally-made copper surface resonator at 300 K on phantom images. The results agree with the predictions, and the difference between the predicted SNR gains and measured SNR gains is 1%. Although the geometry of the HTS surface resonator is different from the QD surface resonator, its SNR is still higher. The results demonstrate that a higher image quality can be obtained with the HTS surface resonator at 77 K. With the HTS surface resonator, the SNR can be improved, suggesting that the HTS surface resonator is a potentially helpful diagnostic tool for MRI imaging in various applications.

Long‐term acclimatization to high‐altitude hypoxia modifies interhemispheric functional and structural connectivity in the adult brain

“…tSNR was used to evaluate the temporal stability of the measured time course of the resting-state fMRI data. sSNR was calculated as the ratio of the mean signal to the standard deviation of the background noise (Song et al 2015). tSNR was estimated as the ratio of the mean signal from all the voxels within the ROI, averaged across time and then divided by the standard deviation across time (Parrish et al 2000).…”