Strategies for Maximizing Signal to Noise in Decoupled Receive Coil Arrays for Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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Abstract
Designing radio frequency coil arrays for optimal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has been a wide area of interest for many years. The optimum coil type for high density arrays and the mitigation of coupling between elements in arrays are significant problems addressed in this thesis. Coupling causes signal and noise transfer between coils, which affects optimum preamplifier noise matching, can cause resonant frequency splitting and degrade individual coil sensitivities. A theoretical framework for modeling capacitive coupling between array elements is developed and it is shown that coils can be completely decoupled by modified capacitive coupling without loss of SNR performance. Composite coils are three naturally decoupled orthogonal coils. During the design and testing of an 8-coil composite coil array their potential benefits in terms of SNR and parallel imaging are demonstrated. Also, composite arrays are compared to surface arrays with equal element count in relation to the maximum theoretical performance.