Xin Chen1, Xingxian Shou1, Yong Wu1, Minhua Zhu1, Mark A. Griswold2, Hiroyuki Fujita1,3, Robert W. Brown1
1Department of Physics, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA; 2Department of Radiology, University Hospitals of Cleveland, Cleveland, OH, USA; 3Quality Electrodynamics LLC, Mayfield Village, OH, USA
RF field inhomogeneities have been a major challenge in today's high-field MRI. Among the various RF coils designed to address this problem, a spiral coil has been proposed to improve field homogeneity by virtue of its special geometry. In another direction, RF shimming has proven to be an efficient method to address such inhomogeneities. Here we combine these approaches and present a modeling of the spiral coil utilizing an efficient computational numerical-analytical optimization to achieve RF shimming. The preliminary results demonstrate significant RF homogeneity improvement at ultra-high RF frequency 400MHz.