Inductively coupled RF coil design for simultaneous microimaging of multiple samples

Abstract

An apparatus for studying multiple samples simultaneously using magnetic resonance imaging was proposed. It consists of a number of individually resonant radiofrequency microcoils, each of which are inductively coupled to a larger transmit and receive coil. The advantages of this approach are ease of construction and coil replacement, if necessary, and the requirement for only one receive channel. Theoretical analysis based on equivalent circuit models has been performed, showing that when n microcoils are critically coupled to the larger coil, the signal-to-noise of each microsample decreases by a factor approximately equal to the square root of n for n ≫ 1: experimental results confirm the theoretical results. Three-dimensional images of the lipid biodistribution in developing canola seeds have been obtained using four inductively coupled microcoils at 600 MHz. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.