End-Grounded Dipole RF Element with Extended Coverage and Minimized SAR at 7T MRI

Dipole RF coil suffers from high peak local SAR and limited imaging coverage. In this work, a novel dipole structure is proposed. Compared with the fractionated dipole, the proposed design achieves a substantially enlarged B1 field coverage and more than 25% SAR reduction by generating a uniform surface current on the coil. Experimental validations were conducted and agreed well with the simulation results.