Travelling-wave MRI for a small-bore imager at 15.2 T

The travelling-wave MRI approach is an alternative to overcome the B 1 inhomogeneity at ultra high field MRI for human applications. More recently, this concept has been also used with small-bore MR imagers. Experiments have been mainly conducted using waveguides with circular cross section and dielectric materials. In this paper, we used a parallel-plate waveguide and a bioinspired surface coil to generate mouse images at 15.2 T. Ex vivo mouse images were acquired without high dielectric materials to conduct the signal at the right frequency. These experimental findings are in very good concordance with results obtained at 3 T and 9.4 T. We demonstrated that travelling-wave MRI with high SNR can be performed with a simple waveguide and one surface coil at ultra high field.