Design and evaluation of a detunable water-based quadrature HEM11 mode dielectric resonator as a new type of volume coil for high field MRI.

An annular dielectric resonator made from distilled water has been designed to operate in degenerate quadrature HEM11 modes at 298.1 MHz (7 Tesla). The circularly polarized B1+ field has a high degree of homogeneity throughout a sample placed within the annulus. The sensitivity of the resonator was measured to be essentially identical to that of an eight-rung high-pass birdcage resonator with the same physical dimensions. High resolution in vivo images have been obtained from the human wrist. A new method of electronically detuning the resonator has also been evaluated. The design is extremely simple and rapid to build, with direct applicability to very high field imaging and also potential integration into human and animal hybrid position emission tomography (PET)/MRI and single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT)/MRI systems due to the lack of conductor attenuation-induced artifacts in the reconstructed nuclear medicine images.