Arrays of mutually coupled receiver coils: theory and application.

Specialized receiver coils having a small sensitive region can provide an improvement in SNR for MR imaging and spectroscopy, at the expense of limiting the usable field of view. This work presents a technique for designing coil arrays that allows the size and location of the sensitive region to be selected remotely. Only one element of the coil array is directly connected to the receiver, allowing flexibility in system design and implementation. A method is presented for the analysis and design of mutually coupled coil arrays of any number of elements of arbitrary shape. The analysis includes mutual coupling effects between primary coils, to allow multiple primary coils to be used simultaneously. A controller system allows remote selection of the sensitive region and automatically matches the impedance of the array to the preamplifier. Results obtained using a mutually coupled coil array designed for spine imaging are shown.