“Domino” Feed Board for Receive Coils
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.

Figures

Preamp decoupling circuitry.

“Domino” concept: all lumped circuit component are embedded into a common substrate. Matching and balun tuning capacitors are soldered in especially cut-out spaces. A very small LNA is soldered inside the main PCB.

Assembled “Domino” feed board 1.

Assembled “Domino” feed board 2.



Proc. Intl. Soc. Mag. Reson. Med. 24 (2016)
3621