Abstract
Developments in metamaterials and related structures such as metasurfaces have opened up new possibilities in designing materials and devices with unique properties. Here we report a new hybrid metasurface structure, comprising a two-dimensional metamaterial surface and a very high permittivity dielectric substrate, that has been designed to enhance the local performance of an ultra-high field MRI scanner. This new flexible and compact resonant structure is the first metasurface which can be integrated with multi-element close-fitting receive coil arrays that are used for all clinical MRI scans. We demonstrate the utility of the metasurface acquiring in-vivo human brain images and proton MR spectra with enhanced local sensitivity on a commercial 7 Tesla system.
Highlights
Metamaterials offer a unique platform for controlling the propagation of acoustic and electromagnetic waves[1,2,3,4]
We demonstrate the application of such a metasurface in human brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and localized MR spectroscopy at 7 Tesla, concentrating on using the metasurface to produce a local increase in the SNR in the occipital cortex
Metallic strips with a thickness of a few tens of micrometres are attached to both sides of a flexible 8 mm thick pad made from a CaTiO3 suspension in water with a relative permittivity of 110
Summary
Metamaterials offer a unique platform for controlling the propagation of acoustic and electromagnetic waves[1,2,3,4]. Since the size of the unit-cells for metamaterials for RF applications lies in the centimetre to tens-of-centimetre range, the vast majority of these previous implementations are based on three-dimensional metamaterial structures that have very large physical dimensions with respect to the available space within an MRI scanner. This is problematic since all clinical MRI scanners use a large array of RF receive coils which are placed as close to the body as possible for maximum sensitivity. These two latter approaches lack the possibility of controlling the exact shape of the local field at subwavelength scales, which is possible using metasurfaces
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