Nonoverlapped Decoupling Technique With Flexible and Stretchable Dielectric-Loaded Coil Elements for Wearable Multichannel RF Coils

Radio frequency (RF) coils are RF front-end components in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system, which serve a significant role in determining image quality. This article introduces a novel decoupling technique using dielectric-loaded coils and evaluates their performance through bench tests, full-wave electromagnetic (EM) simulations, and MR imaging experiments at 9.4 T, thus at the Larmor frequency of 400 MHz. The proposed technique addresses the challenge of coupling between adjacent coil elements in an array and offers potential advantages for wearable multichannel RF coils. The results demonstrate comparable decoupling performance between a dielectric-loaded coil using a nonoverlapping method and a conventional coil with a 20% overlapped decoupling method. MR imaging experiments indicate improvements of 0.86%, 27.72%, and 8.94% in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the near-surface region, center, and overall area encompassing both regions, respectively. Furthermore, the utilization of a dielectric-loaded coil resulted in an 89.8% enhancement in signal uniformity compared to the conventional overlapping technique. The proposed decoupling technique opens new opportunities for the development of flexible and stretchable coil structure toward wearable multichannel RF coils.