Sedig S. Farhat1, Daniel J. Lee1, Carolyn Costigan1, Penny A. Gowland1, Paul M. Glover1
1University of Nottingham, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom
There are very few surface coils that work well at 7T. Up until now the majority of RF coils have been designed as near field antennas. The aim of this work was to design and build a transmit/receive dipole antenna for imaging the human pelvis. The dipole antenna shows the desired improvement in SNR and homogeneous coverage. Coverage goes much further into the pelvis than is shown in the image, indicating that the dipole antenna is better suited for imaging structures deeper into the body than loop or strip transmitting elements.