Computer-assisted design of surface coils used in magnetic resonance imaging. III. The design and construction of two long twin axial antennae for imaging of the whole human spine

Abstract

Two modified folded dipole MRI surface coils were designed, constructed and tested. These antenna which are long twin axial lines use the effective distributive capacitance resulting from the distance between two longitudinal elements to provide tuning. The principal advantage of this type of antenna is the ability to image longer objects such as vertebrae, spinal cord, and longer portions of the extremities. This type of antenna shows less localized high intensity in the image due to a more evenly distributed current pickup from the sample. The coils were designed by calculating theoretical magnetic field distribution for the twin axial coils. These were obtained by integrating the Biot-Savart equation. This gave excellent agreement with an MR image of a di-electrically uniform phantom. As antennae of this sort are nonlinear in response, giving rise to an image intensity nonuniformity, computer software for the MR image was developed to correct the image intensity profile over the experimental volume. The software significantly improved the image quality by reducing the saturated intensity of the region near the antenna, thereby revealing detailed structure of the tissue being imaged.