A 2-ch Wearable Elastic Adjustable Retunable (WEAR) Surface Coil at 3T with Broadband Matching

Motivation: Fixed-volume copper coils fail to accommodate volume changes and flexing of the imaging region, therefore spoil MR signal and hamper the diagnosis. Goal(s): To design a flexible surface coil for breast MR imaging. Approach: A 2-ch stretchable knitted textile coil and a 2-ch reference copper coil, which were compatible with three different sized phantoms were compared in terms of their sensitivity profiles and SNR results. Results: A three-stage broadband matching network could compensate for 15MHz of frequency shift. Although the textile coil was 31-81% more lossy compared to the copper coil, it only resulted in 10-26% SNR decrease. Impact: Despite loss of the WEAR coil, a textile-based coil can sustain a sample-loss-dominated behavior and a broadband matching network can compensate for the frequency shift without compromising on SNR.