Dual-frequency RF Coil for ¹H/¹⁹F Preclinical 9.4T MRI of Small-Animal Lungs

A radiofrequency coil based on periodic resonant structure for 9.4T preclinical magnetic resonance imaging has been developed. Proposed coil allows the study of fluorine and hydrogen content in mice's lungs using resonant excitation of two mutually orthogonal eigenmodes in the resonant structure at two Larmor frequencies of 376 MHz (<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">19</sup>F) and 400 MHz (<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup>H) simultaneously. The proposed radiofrequency coil can be tuned to different Larmor frequencies by changing the tuning capacity values and, therefore, is suitable for other multi-nuclei imaging applications.