MRI Hardware development

The low field (LF) systems (<0.1T) became very popular lately. The LF systems can be of low weight, portable, sustainable with low operational and maintenance costs, and have no requirements for high power, cooling or for a shielded room. The major challenge of LF MRI is the very low signal-to-noise, meaning that the magnet, RF and data acquisition systems all must be highly optimized in order to be able to scan within a reasonable timeframe. RF systems of most LF MRI setups consists of single channel for both transmit and receive or of an individual channel for transmit and one for receive. To speed up the acquisition and to be able to use low power gradients (without cooling system) it is important to have multichannel transmit/receive RF system to enable parallel imaging. The major challenge at LF is decoupling multiple relative high Q-factor coils which experience very low body loading at such low frequencies: this situation is much more challenging than at higher fields. Our goal is to build highly decoupled multiple channel transmit/receive RF systems which would contribute to a faster acquisition and improved SNR.