A Scalable Constellation Coil Design for 3T Body Imaging

Xing Yang¹, CemMurat Deniz², Ye Li², Ryan Brown², Yudong Zhu²

Based on the field equivalence principles of electrodynamics, a previous study1 introduced a unifying solution to RF coil, suggesting that a single surface structure and a surface current driving mechanism may enable not only emulations of but higher performance than any externally applied RF coil. A full-wave EM simulation included therein further demonstrated a particular 128-port constellation coil structures potential as a unifying solution. In an effort to leverage these results and possibly improve todays clinical MR systems that have varying numbers of parallel RF channels, the present study explored a constellation coil design that was adapted to suit a small as well as a large number of channels. MR imaging experiments on a clinical 3T scanner were conducted to quantify SNR behavior of the same coil as the number of implemented ports increases. Commercial phased array coils were used as comparison references.