The long term objective of this project is to develop a high performance surface coil array and multiplexer for MRI imaging of the human spine. Currently, there is no way to image the entire spine without resorting to whole body coils or large surface coils. Available surface coils lose signal to noise (SNR) when coil size is increased. The coil array and multiplexer proposed here would provide an arbitrarily large field of view (FOV) without sacrificing SNR. This would be accomplished by a coil array with elements having minimal coupling, a set of preamplifiers, filters and a signal multiplexer which is synchronized with the MR system. The output of the multiplexer would then be input to the receiver channel of a conventional MR system. The data would then be unscrambled by post processing software to provide a complete image from the independent coils. Such a system will allow a complete MR image survey of the spine while providing the high performance of a single small diameter surface coil. Because the design can be completely external to the main MR system, it will be adaptable to most major MR imaging systems. In addition, the cost of such a design would be significantly lower than currently available alternatives.
