Magnetic resonance imaging receiver coil decoupling using circumferential shielding structures

We propose a flexible phased-array design using circular coils with circumferential shielding structure to achieve robust decoupling between coil elements when the array is either bended or on a flat plane. Two types of circumferential shielding were tested through numerical simulation and imaging experiment. The results demonstrated that our arrays have good decoupling between coils when they are on a curved surface with S 21 <; -16.72 dB. Both types perform higher SNR images than a commercially available 32-channel adult head coil array. Future work will empirically construct a multi-channel array with the number of channel matched to commercial phased array in order to validate the performance in vivo.