Computer-aided design and analysis of surface type RF coil for 1.5 tesla magnetic resonance imaging applications

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technique is widely used to capture the images of the liquid items inside the human body. In this work, a microstrip-based surface type RF radiating coil is proposed for 1.5 tesla MRI. The design involves the determination of inductive reactance for the selected coil geometry using Advanced Design System (ADS) smith chart utility. The resonance capacitor value is selected to make the coil resonance frequency exactly at 63.85 MHz. The coil will have an external matching and tuning capacitors to compensate for the mutual coupling effect of near field radiation. An FR4 (Flame Retardant type 4 Epoxy) substrate having a thickness of 1.6 mm is selected to construct the microstrip-based RF surface coil. Return loss behaviour of the proposed 1.5 tesla 2L section RF coil has been compared with 1.5 tesla 4L section and 7 tesla 4L section RF coils using ADS 2011 S parameter simulation.