Design and development of surface coil for 1.5T MRI scanner

MRI scanner is the most important diagnostic tool that aids in the diagnosis of diseases and offers most sensitive and non-invasive way of Imaging. The sophisticated tool helps clinician to understand the cause of patient´s particular health issue. RF Surface coils are used in MRI for better signal reception as they are more sensitive to signal close to the coil, thus detecting signals from organ of interest more efficiently. Hence attempts are made in order to improve the performance of the coil with respect to its signal to noise ratio, penetration depth, Specific Absorption Rate, etc. In this paper, we have designed, simulated and fabricated the MRI surface coil for 1.5 Tesla scanner. A balun is designed to feed the unbalanced coaxial signal to a balanced coil. Return loss achieved is 21 dB and the bandwidth of the coil is 7.6 MHz. Simulation and experimental results have been compared to validate the proposed design.