Fabric on fabric: A conductive fabric-based wearable coil using cutting plotter for MRI at 3T

Wearable coils fabricated using conductive threads have high resistance that limits SNR. The purpose of this work is to demonstrate the utility of conductive fabric as a coil conductor that can be fabricated using a cutting plotter.

A single-channel coil was developed by feeding a conductive fabric sheet into an automatic cutting plotter. The fabric coil was loaded on a spherical phantom to evaluate SNR and B₁ ⁺ homogeneity and compared with a single-channel conductive thread coil and a rigid printed circuit board (PCB) coil. A 14-channel wearable neck array was developed for structural imaging of the cervical spine and 4D flow MRI of the carotid arteries. The SNR from structural images and velocity-to-noise ratio (VNR) from flow images were compared with a 16-channel commercial coil.

The single-channel conductive fabric coil provided 6.7% and 125.9% SNR increase when compared to the rigid PCB and conductive thread coils across 10 scan repetitions. The B₁ ⁺ field homogeneity was 96.4%, 1% higher than the rigid PCB and conductive thread coils. The wearable neck array demonstrated a 51.1% average SNR increase from the cervical spine images across three volunteers and a 12.0% VNR increase from the postprocessed 4D flow data when compared with the commercial 16-channel array.

The possibility of developing wearable coils using conductive fabric to enhance SNR in structural images and VNR in 4D flow images is demonstrated. The conductive fabric technique enables fabrication on commercial garments resulting in form-fitting wearable coils.