Metamaterial magnetoinductive lens performance as a function of field strength.

Metamaterials are artificial composites that exhibit exotic electromagnetic properties, as the ability of metamaterial slabs to behave like lenses with sub-wavelength resolution for the electric or the magnetic field. In previous works, the authors investigated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) applications of metamaterial slabs that behave like lenses for the radiofrequency magnetic field. In particular, the authors investigated the ability of MRI metamaterial lenses to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of surface coils, and to localize the field of view (FOV) of the coils, which is of interest for parallel MRI (pMRI) applications. A metamaterial lens placed between a surface coil and the tissue enhances the sensitivity of the coil. Although the metamaterial lens introduces losses which add to the losses of the tissue, the enhancement of the sensitivity can compensate these additional losses and the SNR of the coil is increased. In a previous work, an optimization procedure was followed to find a metamaterial structure with minimum losses that will maximize the SNR. This structure was termed magnetoinductive (MI) lens by the authors. The properties of surface coils in the presence of MI lenses were investigated in previous works at the proton frequency of 1.5 T systems. The different frequency dependence of the losses in both the MI lenses and the tissue encouraged us to investigate the performance of MI lenses at different frequencies. Thus, in the present work, the SNR and the pMRI ability of MI lenses are investigated as a function of field strength. A numerical analysis is carried out with an algorithm developed by the authors to predict the SNR behavior of a surface coil loaded with a MI lens at the proton frequencies of 0.5 T, 1.5 T and 3 T systems. The results show that, at 0.5 T, there is a gain in the SNR for short distances, but the SNR is highly degraded at deeper distances. However, at 1.5 T and 3T, the MI lenses provide a gain in the SNR up to a certain penetration depth, which is deeper at 3T, and do not degrade the SNR at deeper distances. These numerical results are checked by means of an experiment. Moreover, a second experiment developed with two-channel arrays of surface coils loaded with MI lenses shows that the pMRI ability of the lenses also improves from 1.5 T to 3 T. This improvement was quantified by means of the calculation of the GRAPPA g-factor.