Magnetron volume coil for Magnetic Resonance Imaging of rodents

Introduction. There is still a great interest to develop volume coils for small-animal MRI. A transceiver volume coil with slotted end-rings and similar to the standard birdcage is proposed in this work. This coil design resembles Mansfield ́s cavity resonator [1]. Unlike the traditional birdcage coil, our coil design was formed with two slotted surface coils [2] connected via rungs like the traditional birdcage coil. The coil end-rings were formed with circular slots evenly distributed as shown in Fig. 1. A coil prototype was developed to work at 300 MHz and quadrature driven for rat body imaging. Phantom and rat body images were acquired to prove the viability of this coil design for high field MRI applications.