Investigation of a Dual-Tuned RF Coil Array Decoupled Using ICE Technique for 1H/19F MR Imaging at 3T

Abstract

The coupling characteristics between adjacent components can affect the performance of coils, and the efficiency of the RF coil is highly dependent on the decoupling effect. Minimizing the electromagnetic (EM) coupling between the coil elements is critical in the RF coil array design. With the more uniqueness and complexity of coil components in RF systems, traditional decoupling methods are less able to overcome the technical challenges in reducing EM coupling of RF coils arrays. In this article, the feasibility of a decoupling method based on induced current elimination (ICE) with non-overlapping decoupled elements, between which there are no physical connections, is investigated for the two-channel 1H/19F RF dual-tuned coil arrays. The isolation between the adjacent coils at both 1H and 19F Larmor frequencies allows for more than −20 dB using the ICE-decoupled method. The co-simulation approach, which can be used in strongly coil arrays per our previous study, was employed to calculate the values of the circuit decoupling components. To validate the efficiency of the ICE-decoupled method, the comparison studies among the proposed method, a two-channel capacitively decoupled, and the overlapping method were conducted. The results, including the S-parameters and the B1 – field distribution, indicated that the two-channel dual-tuned 1H/19F RF coils designed with ICE-decoupled method outperformed those using conventional capacitively decoupled and overlapping decoupled at 3 T.