Home

Phased array coil for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was first introduced by Roemer et al [1] in 1990, and over the past decade or so has gained enormous popularity. Phased array coil became an imperative piece of RF hardware for MRI application mainly because of 2 reasons, firstly it offer high signal-to-noise ration (SNR) and secondly it is well suited for fast parallel imaging techniques (e.g simultaneous acquisition of spatial harmonics (SMASH) [2] and sensitivity encoding (SENSE) [3]) where MRI scan time is shortened by at lest two fold.

Although phased array coil would seems attractive, there are however two major problems that arise from its two major advantages. Foremost, when constructing a phased array coil, as individual surface coils are placed close to one another, the problematic mutual coupling among nearby coils become significant. This causes each coil to see a different environment, and distorts array transmit and receive pattern [4] or usually referred as splitting of  the resonance frequency. Therefore mutual coupling has to be minimized, before one can take full advantage of it. Secondly, in order to implement parallel imaging techniques piror knowledge of the sensitivity profile from individual surface coil has to be obtained before images can be reconstructed, which is generally difficult to do so.

Hence, in this work, we will demonstrate how FEKO is employed in assisting the building of a 3 element phased array coil and using FEKO how easily sensitivity profile can be generated to run SENSE simulation.