The Design of an Open MRI 4-Channel Receive-Only Phased Array Knee Coil

In this work, a new prototype 4-channel receive-only phased array (PA) knee coil for open magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system was designed and constructed. The knee coil was used in a series of pilot MRI studies on a homogenous cylindrical phantom and human knee. From the simulation and experimental results, it is shown that both the arrangement of the coil elements and the width of the coil elements within this new coil array are critical design factors for the coil array to work optimally in an open MRI system. Experimental results showed that a uniform phantom image can be acquired by the prototype phased array knee coil and human knee images further demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed method. The proposed method is appropriate for the design of other open MRI phased array coils.