A New Approach for Magnetic Resonance RF Head Coil Design

In this work, a new concept in high field RF head coil design for MRI applications is presented. An 8-element phased array head coil operating at 4T is designed based on a hybrid method combining reciprocity theorem and inverse method. Both circularly or linearly polarized head coils can be designed. A FDTD/MOM calculation method is used to model the phased array head coil and to accurately calculate the RF behavior inside a human head model. The simulation results reported herein demonstrate the feasibility and flexibility of the design concept and show that, compared to conventional methods, improved B₁ field homogeneity is achievable at high field