Highly-Flexible Highly-Decoupled 1H RF Coils for MR imaging of the lungs as utilized within a 129Xe Transmit-Receive RF Coil at 1.5 T

Flexibility of a RF coil constructed with flexible printed circuit board is reduced when it is co-housed with another RF coil, as typically applied for multinuclear MR imaging. In this work, for multinuclear ¹²⁹Xe-¹H lung imaging application, we propose to use highly-flexible multiple linked resonators for ¹H RF coil along with ¹²⁹Xe RF coil. These highly-flexible ¹H RF coils are also highly-decoupled at ¹²⁹Xe Larmor frequency. For the demonstration of multi-nuclear lung imaging, sixteen receive only highly-flexible highly-decoupled ¹H RF coils were fixed on to a transmit-receive ¹²⁹Xe RF coil, and ¹²⁹Xe and ¹H lung images were obtained.