Low-cost inductively coupled stacked wireless RF coil for MRI at 3 T

Inductively coupled RF coils are an inexpensive and simple method to realize wireless RF coils in MRI. They are low cost and can greatly ease the MR scan setup and improve patient comfort, since they do not require bulky components such as cables, baluns, preamplifiers, and connectors. Previous works have typically used single-layer loops as wireless coils. In this work, we present a novel wireless coil, where two loops are stacked and decoupled with a shared capacitor. We found that such a stacked structure could increase the coil efficiency and SNR. Compared with the single-layer wireless coil, both electromagnetic simulation and MR experiment results demonstrate that the stacked wireless coil has a considerable SNR improvement of approximately 35%.