Benefits of a wireless metamaterial-based radiofrequency coil for clinical wrist MRI

This work is aimed to demonstrate the benefits of a new metamaterial-based radiofrequency coil for clinical 1.5 T hand and wrist MRI. Quantitative characteristics, such as signal-to-noise ratio and field-of-view, and the visual quality of MR images obtained with a standard clinical protocol for wrist imaging are compared between a conventional imaging setup (transmit-receive extremity coil) and a combination of a “birdcage” body coil with an inductively coupled split-loop- based coil. The study was conducted in a representative sample of subjects having different body masses and causing different coil loading. The utilization of the metamaterial-based coil provided large sensitive volume (field-of-view) - for 33% wider than for extremity coil, and allowed to gain the signal-to-noise ratio of all obtained images in a range from 1.26 to 1.40 times. The visual quality of all images acquired with the wireless coil was comparable with those acquired with the extremity coil.