Wideband receive-coil array design using high-impedance amplifiers for broadband decoupling.

Purpose: Multinuclear MRI/S is of increasing interest. Currently, most multinuclear receive array coils are constructed by nesting multiple single-tuned array coils or using switching elements to control the operating frequency, in which case more than one set of conventional isolation preamplifiers and associated decoupling circuits is required. These conventional configurations rapidly become complicated when greater numbers of channels or nuclei are needed. In this work, a novel coil decoupling mechanism is proposed to enable broadband decoupling for array coils with one set of preamplifiers.

Methods: Instead of using conventional isolation preamplifiers, a high-input impedance preamplifier is proposed to create broadband decoupling of the array elements. A matching network consisting of a single inductor-capacitor-capacitor multi-tuned network and a wire-wound transformer was used to interface the surface coil to the high-impedance preamplifier. To validate the concept, the proposed configuration was compared to the conventional preamplifier decoupling configuration on both bench and scanner.

Results: The approach can provide more than 15dB decoupling over a range of 25MHz, covering the Larmor frequencies of Na and H at 4.7T. This multi-tuned prototype obtained 61% and 76% of the imaging SNR at H and Na respectively, 76 and 89% in a higher loading test phantom, when compared to the conventional single-tuned preamplifier decoupling configuration.

Conclusion: With the multinuclear array operation and decoupling achieved using only one layer of array coil and preamplifiers, this work provides a simple approach of building high element-count arrays to enable accelerated imaging or SNR improvement from multiple nuclei.