The Winkler Lab has a dedicated radiofrequency (RF) team with a top-notch RF lab to design, demonstrate, and test high field (HF) and ultra-high field (UHF) receive and transmit coils. Our team is devoted to conducting cutting-edge research studies to explore the benefits of UHF MRI, and to contribute to clinical imaging practices.
Specifically, our studies focus on novel coil/antenna designs to address non-uniform magnetic field distribution and high specific absorption rate (SAR) problems in UHF MRI. We are currently working on inductively coupled coil configurations with high-pass resonance characteristics to address ultra-high frequency resonance requirements of 7T MRI systems. In contrast to conventional coils (eg, transverse electromagnetic coil (TEM), birdcage coil (BC)) and antennas (eg, dipole antennas), our novel architectures create uniform field distribution for larger volume of interest and better B1+/SAR characteristics for the same coil dimensions. These new architectures, which can be used as transmit (Tx) and/or receive (Rx) elements, are also compatible with parallel transmit (pTx) technology, becoming an indispensable part of UHF MRI. Once properly engineered, together with pTx feature, our designs exhibit better signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), yielding high quality MR images over a large field of view. These architectures seem to be the most promising candidates as clinical coils/antennas for the next generation clinical MR imaging platform, 7T.
Video presentations of this work published at the ISMRM 2021 can be viewed here:
Video presentation of this work published at the ISMRM 2022 can be viewed here:
