How Much Does Coil Geometry Matter in High-Field Brain Imaging? a Numerical Study with High-Fidelity Coil Modeling

Shumin Wang¹, Jeff Duyn¹

Transmit coil design at high-field is challenging due to the increasing B1 in-homogeneity and SAR. Both designs with independently controlled elements and non-conventional birdcage-like coils have been proposed. The latter has the advantage of simplicity and the easiness of manufacture. However, the effects of applying different volumetric coil patterns have not been careful studied due to the lack of modeling accuracy of the popular Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method. Here, we applied a newly developed high-fidelity full-wave simulation software package to study such effects on both B1 homogeneity and SAR.