Improving SNR of $1.5$ T MRI using Flexible Magnetic Metasurfaces based on Rectangular Windings

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become an essential non-invasive imaging technique for diagnosing pathological diseases and therapeutic follow-up. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of these conventional MRIs can be enhanced by wrapping different human body parts undergoing MRI scans with metasurfaces. Flexible metasurfaces can uniformly boost the image resolution of different scan slices of MRI irrespective of body part curvatures, which cannot be achieved by using rigid metasurfaces inside MRI scanners. Here, a magnetic metasurface based on rectangular-windings is demonstrated to boost SNR by <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\sim 12$</tex> times inside phantoms mimicking human body for <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$1.5$</tex> T MRI. The proposed metasurface can be integrated as “flexible add-ons” inside commercial body-specific MRI coils for improved imaging.