Integration of electro-textile RF coil array with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system: Design strategies and characterization methods

Radio Frequency (RF) coils are used to receive the magnetic RF signal from the human body during MRI scanning. In this paper, electro-textile will be used to design MRI RF coil array. The coil array incorporating the transmission decoupling circuitry are tuned together with the loading phantom. The S11= − 30dB and S21= −16dB at exactly the required resonant frequency of 127.7 MHz by 3T MRI scanners are achieved. The measured quality factor is related to the relative SNR to predict of electro-textile RF coil SNR performance. A microstrip line method is used to measure the effective conductivity of the electro-textile patterns. It is studied that electro-textile coils whose effective conductivity are two orders of magnitude lower than the copper can still achieve the SNR of around 50% of the copper coil. The RF coil array is made with non-magnetic components and is integrated with pre-amplifier interface for the final integration with MRI systems.