A Miniature Flexible Coil for High-SNR MRI of the Pituitary Gland

Jiahao Lin; Siyuan Liu; Marvin Bergsneider; J. Rock Hadley; Giyarpuram N. Prashant; Sophie Peeters; Robert N. Candler; Kyunghyun Sung

doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3143544

IEEE Access (Jan 2022)

A Miniature Flexible Coil for High-SNR MRI of the Pituitary Gland

Jiahao Lin,
Siyuan Liu,
Marvin Bergsneider,
J. Rock Hadley,
Giyarpuram N. Prashant,
Sophie Peeters,
Robert N. Candler,
Kyunghyun Sung

Affiliations

Jiahao Lin: Department of Radiological Sciences, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Siyuan Liu: ORCiD; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Marvin Bergsneider: Department of Neurosurgery, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
J. Rock Hadley: ORCiD; Department of Radiology, The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Giyarpuram N. Prashant: Department of Neurosurgery, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Sophie Peeters: Department of Neurosurgery, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Robert N. Candler: ORCiD; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Kyunghyun Sung: ORCiD; Department of Radiological Sciences, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3143544
Journal volume & issue: Vol. 10
pp. 12619 – 12628

Abstract

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Clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the pituitary gland sometimes fails to detect small pituitary tumors due to limited signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and spatial resolution. Thus, neurosurgeons may need to resort to surgical exploration and systematic slicing of the pituitary gland to identify the small pituitary tumors. In this work, we designed a single-loop miniature flexible coil that can be surgically positioned millimeters from the pituitary gland, enabling high-SNR pituitary MRI. We investigated the spatial distributions of the image SNR of the miniature coil, via both numerical simulation and phantom experiments. We also explored the feasibility of increased SNR within the pituitary gland based on simulated surgical placements. Compared to the commercial head coil, our miniature coil achieved up to a 19-fold SNR improvement within the region of interest, and the simulation and phantom experiment reached a good agreement, with an error of 1.1% ± 0.8%. High resolution MRI scans further demonstrated the visual improvement of the miniature coil against the commercial head coil. The cross-validation of the simulation and the phantom experiment showed the potential of using the numerical simulation model to accelerate the coil design prototyping and iteration and to optimize coil design in the future.

Published in IEEE Access

ISSN: 2169-3536 (Online)
Publisher: IEEE
Country of publisher: United States
LCC subjects: Technology: Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering
Website: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6287639

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