Optimal excitation of single mode resonators: demonstration with a 3 T MRI metasolenoid

Wireless passive resonators have been developed to inductively couple to the birdcage body coil. Such systems have been explored in the form of ceramic resonators with high permittivity but also with metamaterial or metasurface devices that can exhibit resonant behaviour at a given Larmor frequency. The resonant focusing of the radiofrequency field is used to lower the input power during transmission and improve the sensitivity of the body coil during reception. The gain is only obtained in a limited volume located within or close to the resonant structure. Typically, such passive devices do not support parallel imaging and demonstrated limited SNR enhancement compared to dense multichannel receive arrays. Nonetheless, these resonators have seen recent development with applications to wrist or breast MRI mostly in 1.5 T MRI scanners. Here we propose to design, build, and study a metasolenoid resonator operating at 3 T. The metasolenoid was characterized on phantom to validate the B₁ efficiency increase with respect to the birdcage polarization excitation. We reported a high B₁ efficiency gain for circularly (3.2-fold) and linearly (5.8-fold) polarized excitation. Consequently, and according to analytical calculations, we demonstrated that when excited with linearly polarized excitation, the metasolenoid had a B₁ efficiency 26 % higher when excited by the default circularly polarized excitation. Numerical simulations on voxel model showed that in presence of the resonator the B₁ efficiency gain normalized by the maximum local SAR was significantly improved when introducing the metasolenoid but the influence of the excitation polarization was reduced to a few percent.