Interdigitated Metasurfaces for Enabling Homogeneously Boosted Magnetic Fields during $1.5$T MRI Scans

Metasurfaces, with their extraordinary ability to manipulate electromagnetic waves, are enabling a new and advanced phase of scanning in multiple medical diagnostic technologies. In recent years, metasurfaces have been showing promise in enhancing the scanning capabilities of one of the most promising clinical diagnostic techniques i.e. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of an MRI scan is a measure of how clear and detailed the scanned image is. The higher the SNR, the clearer and more detailed scan images will be obtained which translates to a more accurate diagnosis of patient's medical conditions. Recently, researchers have shown that both rigid and flexible metasurfaces could improve MRI performance by enhancing SNR, with flexible metasurfaces better suited to MRI system adaptability. These reported flexible metasurfaces have shown a boost in SNR but have not claimed a uniform magnetic field enhancement throughout the phantom/human tissues. In this manuscript, we propose a new practical approach to uniformly boost SNR over the entire phantom using metasurfaces. The designed flexible interdigitated metasurface could provide a uniform enhancement of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\sim 3$</tex> times in SNR over the entire phantom. This may be translated to a scan image from a <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\sim 3$</tex> times higher field strength MRI scanner than a typical <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$1.5$</tex> T.