Integration of Electro-textile RF Coil Array with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) System: Design Strategies and Characterization Methods

Radio Frequency (RF) coils are used to receive the magnetic RF signal from the human body during MRI scanning. In this paper, electro-textile will be used to design MRI RF coil array. The coil array incorporating the transmission decoupling circuitry are tuned together with the loading phantom. The S-11=-30dB and S-21=-16dB at exactly the required resonant frequency of 127.7 MHz by 3T MRI scanners are achieved. The measured quality factor is related to the relative SNR to predict of electrotextile RF coil SNR performance. A microstrip line method is used to measure the effective conductivity of the electro-textile patterns. It is studied that electro-textile coils whose effective conductivity are two orders of magnitude lower than the copper can still achieve the SNR of around 50% of the copper coil. The RF coil array is made with non-magnetic components and is integrated with pre-amplifier interface for the final integration with MRI systems.