Improvement of Travelling Wave Excitation for Whole Body 7T MRI with an Extended Gradient Coil RF-Shield of 1.58 M Length

Tim Herrmann¹, Johannes Mallow¹, Kyoung Nam Kim¹, Johannes Bernarding¹, Joerg Stadler²

Whole body MRI at 7T is still a big challenge on the route to clinical use. This study shows how the travelling wave concept can be optimized to work as an efficient body-coil replacement. By simulating the RF-system including the complete 7T whole body scanner it was possible to consider all the important parameters of the experiment. Directional characteristics, distance to the object, and the excitation parameters of the constructed patch antenna were optimized. Tx-only as well as Tx-Rx scenarios were performed. Furthermore, a comparison shows that the travelling wave (TW) concept can keep up with conventional RF methods.