The Serial Resonant Antenna for the Large Field of View Magnetic Resonance Imaging

A serial resonant antenna for the large field of view (FOV) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is presented. It consists of metallic patches cascaded through lumped capacitors in serial on the top layer of a grounded dielectric substrate. The theoretical analysis show that at the resonant frequency, uniformly distributed current with zero phase delay is produced independent of the antenna length, hence a uniform magnetic field for large FOV MRI can be achieved. Integrated with the L-shaped tunable matching network, the antenna can be tuned easily to operate rigorously at the working frequency of the MRI system. The numerical modeling, physical fabrication and measurement, as well as the phantom imaging are carried out to design, characterize and verify the performance of the proposed antenna for MRI.