Desmond Teck Beng Yeo1, Eric Fiveland1,
Randy Giaquinto1, Tingting Song2, Xing Yang2,
Keith Park1, Adam B. Kerr3, Xu Chu2, Ileana
Hancu1
1GE Global Research, Niskayuna, NY,
United States; 2GE Global Research, Shanghai, China; 3Department
of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States
Inter-element
inductive coupling presents an important challenge in parallel transmit coil
arrays. An ultra-low output impedance RF amplifier (RFPA) was previously
introduced to address this issue. In this work, the improvements in transmit
decoupling between the ultra-low output impedance RFPAs and conventional
RFPAs under different loading conditions were investigated with two types of
coil arrays. Bench tests and imaging studies performed on a 3T MR scanner
with 8-channel transmit and receive flat array and cylindrical coils showed
improved inter-element transmit decoupling, and, strong correlation between
image-based B1+ decoupling measures and inter-element scattering parameters
(S21).
Keywords