Karupppasamy Subburaj1, Yong Pang1,
Serena Scott1, Bagrat Amirbekian1, Richard B. Souza1,2,
Sharmila Majumdar1, Xiaoliang Zhang1
1Department of Radiology
& Biomedical Imaging, University of California San Francisco, San
Francisco, CA, United States; 2Department of Physical Therapy
& Rehabilitation Science, University of California San Francisco, San
Francisco, CA
Traditional cylindrical knee coils designs present difficulties when imaging flexed knee joints in kinematic studies. We present a novel flexible TR coil based on microstrip transmission lines for in-vivo MR imaging of flexed human knee joints at 7T. This single channel coil was designed to have wing shaped symmetrical loops on a partially foldable teflon substrate to take advantage of 2nd harmonic resonance and a large coverage volume. The coil has a good Q factor ratio and the resonant frequency can be tuned to a broad range in order to adapt to various knee sizes.