Abstract
This study attempts to compare the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the 40 mm High-Temperature Superconducting (HTS) surface resonator at 77 K and the 35 mm commercial quadrature (QD) surface resonator at 300 K in a 3 Tesla (T) MRI imager. To aquire images for the comparison, we implemented a phantom experiment using the 40 mm diameter Bi2Sr2Ca2Cu3Ox (Bi-2223) HTS surface resonator, the 35 mm commercial QD surface resonator and the 40 mm professionally-made copper surface resonator. The HTS surface resonator at 77 K provided a 1.43-fold SNR gain over the QD surface resonator at 300 K and provided a 3.84-fold SNR gain over the professionally-made copper surface resonator at 300 K on phantom images. The results agree with the predictions, and the difference between the predicted SNR gains and measured SNR gains is 1%. Although the geometry of the HTS surface resonator is different from the QD surface resonator, its SNR is still higher. The results demonstrate that a higher image quality can be obtained with the HTS surface resonator at 77 K. With the HTS surface resonator, the SNR can be improved, suggesting that the HTS surface resonator is a potentially helpful diagnostic tool for MRI imaging in various applications.
Highlights
As the development in biomedicine, psychology, and clinical progresses both higher spatial and temporal resolutions are needed to observe the finer details of certain structures
Cheng et al [2] built a 5-inch tape RF receiving resonator for a 0.21 Tesla (T) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system, and demonstrated a 3-fold signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement over an equivalent room temperature copper resonator, which indicates the feasibility of High-temperature superconducting (HTS) tapes for MRI
The magnitude of SNR using different kinds of surface resonators are listed in Table 2; the highest SNR is that of the HTS surface resonator at 77 K and the lowest SNR is that of the professionally-made copper surface resonator at 300 K
Summary
As the development in biomedicine, psychology, and clinical progresses both higher spatial and temporal resolutions are needed to observe the finer details of certain structures. Improving the SNR is essential for elevating image quality. High-temperature superconducting (HTS) radiofrequency (RF) resonators have been regarded as a promising tool for MR imaging due to their low impedance of below critical temperature and are currently used to improve the sensitivity of RF detecting resonators. Grasso et al [1] measured the quality factors (QF) of surface resonators made with Bi-2223 tapes and observed that they were only slightly less than that of YBa2Cu3Oy (YBCO) films. Cheng et al [2] built a 5-inch tape RF receiving resonator for a 0.21 Tesla (T) MRI system, and demonstrated a 3-fold SNR improvement over an equivalent room temperature copper resonator, which indicates the feasibility of HTS tapes for MRI. The 35 mm quadrature (QD) surface resonator (Rapid Biomedical Corp., Wurzburg, Germany) was chosen for this comparision in this study
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