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Abstract #1875

A Printed Loop Element with Integrated Capacitors & Co-Planar Shield for 7 Tesla

Mary Preston McDougall1,2, Steven M. Wright1,2, Joseph Rispoli1, Mario Carillo2, Ivan Dimitrov3, Sergey Cheshkov3, Craig Malloy3

1Biomedical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, United States; 2Electrical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, United States; 3University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, United States


Shields for RF surface coils have been investigated since the earliest days of MRI. Some authors have stated that RF shields are essential for 7T surface coils over 10 cm in diameter, and others have successfully built smaller loops as array elements without using shields, consistent with this guideline. This abstract examines the effectiveness of a co-planar shield at 7T. The co-planar configuration, combined with coils using the capacitance of dual-sided PC boards to replace segmenting capacitors, enables simple, printed coils. This may be useful in constructing array coils, particularly when compared to coils with full ground-plane shields.