Bing Wu1, Chunsheng Wang1, Douglas Kelley2, Duan Xu1, Daniel Vigneron1,3, Sarah Nelson1,3, Xiaoliang Zhang1,3
1Radiology&Biomedical Imaging, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA; 2GE Healthcare, San Francisco, CA, USA; 3UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Group Program in Bioengineering, SanFrancisco&Berkeley, CA, USA
In most of ultra-high field microstrip array designs, the ground planes of microstrip elements are separated to minimize their mutual coupling. Practically, due to the space limitation, the size of ground planes of the microstrip elements is usually not large enough to become a true ground, the array may suffer from cable resonance, lower Q factors and imaging quality degradations. In this work we present an approach to improve the performance of such transceiver arrays by introducing RF shields outside the microstrip array and the feeding coaxial cables. With this improvement, reduced interaction among cables, better resonance stability, better Q-factors and thus improved imaging quality are achieved