An Open-Source Software Toolbox for Rapid Radiofrequency Coil Design and Evaluation in MRI

Image quality and resolution in MRI are fundamentally constrained by the performance of radiofrequency (RF) coils used to excite the spins and receive the signal. Electromagnetic (EM) simulations are essential for optimizing coil performance. Existing tools are often slow, memory-intensive, and require expensive licenses. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel, comprehensive, open-source EM simulation tool for RF coil design in MRI.

Our toolbox consists of four complementary software components: (1) a full-wave 3D EM solver based on the wire-surface-volume integral equation (WSVIE), where tensor decompositions reduce memory usage and accelerate simulations for fine body model resolutions; (2) a reduced-order model technique enabling patient-specific coil simulations in minutes; (3) a fully automatic circuit co-simulator for coil tuning, matching, decoupling, preamplifier decoupling, and detuning; and (4) a numerical EM basis generator that can be used to compute ultimate performance metrics. We demonstrated the toolbox with a series of simulations for different applications at 7 T MRI.

Our proposed reduced-order model WSVIE solver was 70 times faster compared to a commercial solver for the simulation of a 31-channel 7 T head coil. Our co-simulator tuned, matched, and decoupled the array in 30 min, compared to a few days time of manual interactions needed with the commercial package. The average difference between the signal-to-noise ratio maps was less than 15%.

The proposed open-source simulation framework enables fast, memory-friendly, accurate, and anatomy-specific RF coil array design, making it a powerful tool for RF coil engineering.