Slotted end-ring volume coil for small animal Magnetic Resonance Imaging at 7T

Introduction. The development of transceiver volume coils for high field MRI is still a very dynamic field of investigation and development. A volume coil based on the high frequency cavity resonator [1] is presented in this paper for whole-body MRI of rodents at 7 Tesla (proton frequency: 299.47 MHz). This coil design has been previously tested on phantoms at 170 MHz (4T for protons) with standard spin echo sequences [2]. The encouraging results obtained with this coil design motivated us to develop a whole-body coil for rodents (in a) at higher magnetic field MRI. The coil design with slotted end-rings presented here is a variant of the coil above and was developed to work at 300 MHz. This coil design operates in the transceiver mode and was designed for small biological samples. A popular birdcage coil was constructed in order to compare their performances. Phantom and rat images proved the viability of this coil design for high field MRI applications.