New applications of inverse methods in the design of MRI coils

An inverse procedure is developed and applied to the design of new short actively shielded main magnet coils and new radio frequency (rf) coils in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The new main magnet system is found through the use of inverse functional methods on bundled, discrete solenoidal coil systems, following the design procedure of Thompson et al. (1994). An additional wire bundle placed at the center of the system is a novel feature of the design. Similar functional methods are combined with the method of moments for the design of new rf coils where an advantage of the procedure is that it provides a computational technique for optimization of field uniformity, signal-to-noise, feeding, tuning, and impedance matching. Successful prototypes have been built for both of the new coil designs.