To date there is no single reference aimed at teaching the art of applications guided coil design for use in MRI. This RF Coils for MRI handbook is intended to become this reference. Heretofore, much of the know-how of RF coil design is bottled up in various industry and academic laboratories around the world. Some of this information on coil technologies and applications techniques has been disseminated through the literature, while more of this knowledge has been withheld for competitive or proprietary advantage. Of the published works, the record of technology development is often incomplete and misleading, accurate referencing and attribution assignment being tantamount to admission of patent infringement in the commercial arena. Accordingly, the literature on RF coil design is fragmented and confusing. There are no texts and few courses offered to teach this material. Mastery of the art and science of RF coil design is perhaps best achieved through the learning that comes with a long career in the field at multiple places of employmentuntil now. RF Coils for MRI combines the lifetime understanding and expertise of many of the senior designers in the field into a single, practical training manual. It informs the engineer on part numbers and sources of component materials, equipment, engineering services and consulting to enable anyone with electronics bench experience to build, test and interface a coil. The handbook teaches the MR system user how to safely and successfully implement the coil for its intended application. The comprehensive articles also include information required by the scientist or physician to predict respective experiment or clinical performance of a coil for a variety of common applications. It is expected that RF Coils for MRI becomes an important resource for engineers, technicians, scientists, and physicians wanting to safely and successfully buy or build and use MR coils in the clinic or laboratory. Similarly, this guidebook provides teaching material for students, fellows and residents wanting to better understand the theory and operation of RF coils. Many of the articles have been written by the pioneers and developers of coils, arrays and probes, so this is all first hand information! The handbook serves as an expository guide for hands-on radiologists, radiographers, physicians, engineers, medical physicists, technologists, and for anyone with interests in building or selecting and using RF coils to achieve best clinical or experimental results. The Preface gives more background on the content: Since Purcell, Torrey and Pounds re-entrant cavity resonator and Bloch, Hansen and Packards crossed transmit and receive coil pair (Physical Review, 1946), RF coils have evolved from the simple test-tube loaded, wire-wound solenoids and copper-tape resonators of chemistry labs to the complex multi-channel transmitters and receivers of modern clinical and pre-clinical MRI systems. With deference to the literature already covering basic coil structures, this Handbook primarily addresses the dearth of reporting on modern coils for state-of-the-art MRI systems used in clinical diagnostics, biomedical research, and engineering Rs with the sensitivity and efficiency of a surface coil, receive, transmit, and transceiver arrays of loops or transmission line elements have found new and more powerful applications in parallel imaging and parallel transmit schemes to further improve imaging speed, quality and safety. To address this important topic, four chapters are included covering receiver loop arrays, array design for parallel imaging, transceiver loop arrays, and bench top characterization of multi-channel coil arrays. Volume Coils, as their name suggests, encompass a sample volume. Common clinical examples are head, limb, and body coils. While there are a number of volume coil technologies by various names, two popular designs are the birdcage and TEM coils and their many variants. The birdcage was
