Design of a new dual-helix loop coil for intravascular MR imaging

Introduction To discriminate between the vessel wall layers and plaque constituents in atherosclerosis, the image pixel size must be decreased to less than half a millimeter as the artery wall and fibrous cap thicknesses are very small (e.g. a fraction of a millimeter). For this purpose, researchers have introduced different types of intravascular loop and loopless coils, of which the single-helix loop coil is one. These coils are simply receiver antennas which have to be transported to the region of interest through a catheter and produce artery images with the highest pixel SNR in MRI. So far, some types of helix loop coils are presented as single-helix coils, single and array opposed-solenoid coils. In this study, a new dualhelix loop is introduced. Its SNR maps in radial and longitudinal planes have been analyzed and compared with a conventional single-helix loop coil. The results show that for the coil design introduced here, the amount of pixel SNR is increased by 33% compared to a conventional single-helix loop coil.