Victor Taracila1, Miguel Navarro1, and Fraser Robb1
1GE Healthcare, Aurora, OH, United States
Synopsis
The physical
size of the on-coil electronics could be one of the major obstacles in building
high density RF coils. First, there is a clear mechanical desire to reduce its
size in order to make the coils lighter and thinner; second, bulky electronics
placed on small loops can disturb the sensitivity profile; third, for MR-PET
applications the RF coils, in addition to the requirements mentioned above,
have to be transparent to PET radiation. In order to achieve these critical to
quality objectives we propose completely embedding all of the lumped components
into a common printed circuit board (PCB).Introduction
In modern MRI coils with high number of receive channels
the minimization of the size of the on-coil electronics is one of the major
goals. On one hand there is a clear mechanical desire to reduce its size in
order to make the coils lighter and thinner; on the other hand bulky
electronics placed on small loops can disturb the sensitivity profile. For
MR-PET applications the RF coils, in addition to the requirements mentioned
above, have to be transparent to PET radiation. In order to achieve these
critical to quality objectives we propose completely embedding all of the
lumped components into a common printed circuit board (PCB).
Design Concept
The
schematic of a typical one channel receive coil and its on-coil electronics is
represented in Figure 1. The feed board is delimited with black dotted line.
Its main components are: matching capacitor Cm; input balun with its specific
electric length, inductance L and tuning capacitor C; and low input impedance
preamplifier.
Results and Discussions
B
For an 8 cm by 8 cm rectangular
loop at 127.73MHz for a commonly exhibited loading resistance, the matching
capacitor was found to be 43pF [1]. The appropriate matching inductance was
caluclated from transmittion line theory [2] and introduced into the circuit as
an imput balun. A 6-layer PCB with Rogers 4003 substrate was chousen for
“Domino” feed board concept proof. Its low loss tangent assures low noise added
before amplification as well as high common mode impedance for the input balun.
As a reusult of its geometrical configuration, the tuning capacitor was found
to be C=112pF. A small low imput impedance LNA with round corners was designed
so that the internal soldering of the LNA PCB and main PCB can be accurately
performed for input and output signal as well as ground. The output coaxial
cable’s internal pin is soldered to the output of the LNA – via
insertion through a horizontally cut hole into the PCB – and
its shield to the ground. For better LNA shielding, one can cover it with metalic
foil. The resulting common mode impednace of the input balun is about 600 ohms.
The “Domino” feed board does not have a connector after the preamp, making it
inexpensive and PET transparent. Overall, the Domino feed board dimentions are
14 x 28 x 4.13 mm^3 which is about 1.5 ml in volume. The mass of a fully
assembled feed board is 2.55g.
Acknowledgements
No acknowledgement found.References
1. Reykowski et al., Design of matching network for low impedance preamp,
MRM 33, 848-852, 1995.
2. 2. Pozar D. M., Microwave Engineering, Third Ed., John
Wiley&Sons, 2005.