Knee MRI under varying flexion angles utilizing a flexible flat cable antenna.
The aim of this study is to fabricate and test a novel flexible flat cable antenna (FFCA) for MRI of the knee at different flexion angles. The FFCA was made of a flat cable, a tuning/matching circuit and a signal transmission line. To test its feasibility and validity, in vitro and in vivo experiments were carried out on a 3.0 T MR scanner. The in vitro experiment suggested that the proposed FFCA could achieve a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 336, while the SNR of an eight-channel knee coil was 291, and phantom images from the FFCA are homogeneously distributed. In the in vivo experiment, the FFCA had a higher SNR of 169 in the region of interest and more than 48.5 cm of longitudinal coverage, while the corresponding values for the commercial coil were 153 and 22.5 cm. Finally, five sagittal knee images at different flexion angles were acquired. The FFCA could acquire satisfactory knee images at different flexion angles, with the advantages of simplicity, low cost, large field of view and high SNR. It may therefore be further used to improve MR image quality of the knee joint.
Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing, China.
Fan
F
Jia
Hongyang
H
Yuan
Diange
D
Zhou
Jue
J
Zhang
Xiaoying
X
Wang
Jing
J
Fang
D004867:Equipment Design; D005240:Feasibility Studies; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D007719:Knee Joint / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000295:instrumentation*; D019047:Phantoms, Imaging; D018583:Pliability; D059629:Signal-To-Noise Ratio
FFCA; flexible MR receiver; flexion angle; high SNR; knee MRI; large FOV; loopless antenna; monopole antenna