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Abstract:
Inductively coupled (IC) wireless radiofrequency (RF) coils are intensively studied in the recent years due to customer benefits such as absence of vendor-specific interfaces as well as increased safety performance caused by the absence of cable con- nections [1–4]. Moreover, IC wireless coils have cost-efficient configurations due to no need of low-noise non-magnetic receive electronics and proprietary connectors. IC wireless coil operational principle is based on inductive coupling with transceiver body coil of MR scanner. Dedicated breast IC wireless coils are of special interest due to the low availability of breast coils in clinical practice. Therefore, several solutions are available to the moment [1,3] showing promising results in the context of MR mammography. These solutions are based on the sets of coupled volume resonators covering the targeted ROI of human breast. Though the results obtained with coupled resonators are interesting, there is still a room for improvements in the context of IC wireless coil receive sensitivity (SNR). Moreover, the known wireless coils for breast imaging operate as transceiver (Tx/Rx) coils and the standard clinical workflow is violated due to the need of manual reference voltage calibration. In this work, we demonstrate the first receive-only (Rx-only) quadrature wireless coil for bilateral breast imaging at 1.5T. Two pairs of decoupled Helmholz-type resonators are employed having additional benefit as side access to breast tissues. The Rx-only operation is due to the passive decoupling diode circuits. The quadrature coil is compared with the linear configuration by numer- ical simulations and phantom MR imaging. In-vivo study of healthy volunteer at 1.5T scanner was performed showing high potential of using such coil in clinical MR mammography.
