An Investigation of RF Frontend Scalability

Yudong Zhu¹, Xing Yang¹, Bei Zhang¹, Leeor Alon¹

Most workhorse receive coils are each optimized for a certain body region, parallel acceleration, and frequency. To improve workflow a significant recent development strives to consolidate a scanners suite of coils with a multi-element coil ensemble that encloses a subject in a fixed way but allows application-dependent multi-port signal combination. The task of creating a one-structure-fits-all coil to replace dedicated coils is very challenging. We explore the perspective of optimizing RF frontend scalability, the ability for a same RF coil structure to adapt to most tasks by leveraging flexible and advantageous signal combination afforded by a large number of channels.