Design of a well decoupled 4-channel catheter Radio Frequency coil array for endovascular MR imaging at 3T

Catheter-based radio frequency (RF) coils for interventional MRI are proposed as a means of obtaining high resolution images with significant advantages over conventional external signal detecting RF coils. A 4-channel catheter array coil was designed to improve the power transmission and SNR using parallel imaging and ultra-sensitive imaging with maximum proximity inside a blood vessel phantom. This design can be scaled to smaller/larger form to fit in tiny/wide vascular structure to provide the required B1 fields and sufficient decoupling among the resonant elements. Numerical simulation was employed to validate the performance and the feasibility of the proposed design.