Design of transverse head gradient coils using a layer-sharing scheme

A power efficient actively shielded two-channel transverse MRI gradient coil numerical design

Large and fast electrical current pulses are typically applied to conventional single-channel transverse MR gradient coils. However, these pulses result in a significant amount of power losses and heating of the coils. Previously, we presented a cylindrical multi-channel Z-gradient coil design that has better power efficiency compared to the single-channel design. In this work, we further investigate the DC power advantage for a two-channel actively-shielded transverse cylindrical gradient coil over the single-channel design. The conventional coil quadrants are radially divided into two sections, one for each channel, for both the primary and shielding surfaces. The symmetric inner sections of both the primary and shielding coils are assigned to the first channel, while the outer enclosing sections for each quadrant are assigned to the second channel. Discrete wire design is employed, where quasi-elliptic functions are used to parameterize the turns of each section. The coil geometric parameters, section size, number of turns, and turn locations are used as the design optimization parameters. The coils are optimized to maximize the coil's efficiency while keeping the linearity error less than 10% and the shielding ratio above 85%. The design procedure is employed to design both the single and two-channel transverse gradient coils for comparison. Eleven different two-channel configurations having different section sizes were investigated. Results show that the power used to drive the most power-efficient two-channel coil is less than that of the single-channel design by ∼25%. Moreover, the two-channel configuration showed slightly better shielding efficiency.

A volumetric finite-difference method for the design of three-dimensional, arbitrary-structured MRI gradient coil

A volumetric finite-difference based method is presented in this paper for the design of three-dimensional (3D), arbitrarily structured gradient coils in magnetic resonance imaging. In the proposed method, the coil space is discretized with quasi-rectangular elements, and the current density of each element is expressed by a finite-difference based numerical approximation of stream functions. The magnetic flux density at target field points can be calculated by those stream function values at all grids of the coil space. The optimization problem is constructed and solved to determine the stream function and coil patterns. This proposed method has been tested on several designs that include a shielded, ultra-short cylindrical coil, a partially shielded biplanar coil, and an asymmetric head coil with 3D geometries. The numerical results show that the proposed method is straightforward to implement and is versatile and suitable for designing complex structured gradient coils with high electromagnetic performance.

Tesseral superconducting shim coil design with quasi-saddle geometry for use in high-field magnet system

Superconducting shim coils are frequently used in high-field magnetic resonance imaging or nuclear magnetic resonance system for their high sensitivity and shimming strength. The design of superconducting shim coils is based on the spherical harmonic decomposition, and each shim coil is normally dedicated for correcting one specific harmonic component. Conventional superconducting shim coil with a saddle loop has observable winding error near the corner, which gives rise to arc transformation when winding layer by layer. Simulation analysis shows that the arc corner transformation will induce the magnetic field deviation by more than double of the theoretical design ±1%, which may be up to ±3% after real winding. An improved shim coil design method with a quasisaddle geometry was proposed to correct the winding error. With the consideration of both the rounded corner of the saddle loop and the arc side, the new design offers the magnetic field deviation within ±1%. In addition to reducing the winding error, the proposed design also facilitates the winding process.

A spiral, bi-planar gradient coil design for open magnetic resonance imaging

PURPOSE

To design planar gradient coil for MRI applications without discretization of continuous current density and loop-loop connection errors.

METHODS

In the new design method, the coil current is represented using a spiral curve function described by just a few control parameters. Using a proper parametric equation set, an ensemble of spiral contours is reshaped to satisfy the coil design requirements, such as gradient linearity, inductance and shielding.

RESULTS

In the given case study, by using the spiral coil design, the magnetic field errors in the imaging area were reduced from 5.19% (non-spiral design) to 4.47% (spiral design) for the transverse gradient coils, and for the longitudinal gradient coil design, the magnetic field errors were reduced to 5.02% (spiral design). The numerical evaluation shows that when compared with conventional wire loop, the inductance and resistance of spiral coil was reduced by 11.55% and 8.12% for x gradient coil, respectively.

CONCLUSION

A novel spiral gradient coil design for biplanar MRI systems, the new design offers better magnetic field gradients, smooth contours than the conventional connected counterpart, which improves manufacturability.

Spiral Gradient Coil Design for Use in Cylindrical MRI Systems

In magnetic resonance imaging, the stream function based method is commonly used in the design of gradient coils. However, this method can be prone to errors associated with the discretization of continuous current density and wire connections. In this paper, we propose a novel gradient coil design scheme that works directly in the wire space, avoiding the system errors that may appear in the stream function approaches. Specifically, the gradient coil pattern is described with dedicated spiral functions adjusted to allow the coil to produce the required field gradients in the imaging area, minimal stray field, and other engineering terms. The performance of a designed spiral gradient coil was compared with its stream-function counterpart. The numerical evaluation shows that when compared with the conventional solution, the inductance and resistance was reduced by 20.9 and 10.5%, respectively. The overall coil performance (evaluated by the figure of merit (FoM)) was improved up to 26.5% for the x -gradient coil design; for the z-gradient coil design, the inductance and resistance were reduced by 15.1 and 6.7% respectively, and the FoM was increased by 17.7%. In addition, by directly controlling the wire distributions, the spiral gradient coil design was much sparser than conventional coils.