New resonator geometries for ICE decoupling of loop arrays

To overcome B1 inhomogeneities and technological difficulties in building large-sized volume resonators, multi-channel arrays are commonly used for transmission at ultra-high fields. One of the main challenges in designing transmit arrays is to minimize the coupling among coil elements. The induced current elimination (ICE) method, which uses additional resonator elements to cancel coils’ mutual electromagnetic (EM) coupling, has proven to be a simple and efficient approach to decouple loop, stripline and dipole arrays. However, in previous embodiments the decoupling elements acted as “magnetic-walls”, blocking the magnetic field and leading to MR signal loss near the elements. In this study, we improved the ICE method to avoid the signal cancellation by using overlapped and perpendicular decoupling loops.