Design and development of phased-array coils for 1.5T MRI scanner

MRI scanner is the most important diagnostic tool that aids in the diagnosis of diseases and offers most sensitive and non-invasive way of Imaging. The sophisticated tool helps clinician to understand the cause of patient's particular health issue. RF Phased Array coils are used in MRI for better signal reception as they are more sensitive to signal close to the coil, thus detecting signals from organ of interest more efficiently. Hence attempts are made in order to improve the performance of the coil with respect to its signal to noise ratio, penetration depth, Specific Absorption Rate, etc. Phased Array coils are nothing but a number of overlapping surface coils. In this paper, we have designed, simulated and fabricated the MRI surface coil by overlapping to form phased array for 1.5 Tesla scanner. A balun is designed to feed the unbalanced coaxial signal to a balanced coil Return loss of single coil is 21.96 dB and that of array is 25.84 dB and reverse isolation is 37.08 dB with bandwidth of 7.6 MHz. Simulation and experimental result have been compared to validate the proposed design of single coil.