Novel Electro-textile Antenna Designs Supporting Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Communication Systems

Electro-textile materials have the advantage of seamlessly integrating electronics with human clothes and are favorable in both medical imaging and communication systems. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is one of the most powerful imaging modality used clinically. Radio Frequency (RF) coils serving as the ’eyes’ of MRI scanners to receive RF magnetic signals are the fundamental limiting factor to render high-quality images. It is an increasing demand that RF coils provide more comfortable patient experience, are applied to more imaging anatomies, offer high-quality images, and decrease error rate in order to benefit patients, physicians, and hospitals. The electro-textile MRI RF coil array systems are shown in the research to satisfy all the above requirements. In this research, the high strength and highly conductive electro-textiles are used to fabricate multi-layer RF coil array systems for neck imaging. The dissertation proposed and implemented a systematic approach to design, fabricate and characterize electro-textile RF coil arrays overcoming the difficulties of sensitive frequency tuning, input impedance matching, mutual coupling and the integration with the MRI scanners. The Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) using electro-textile RF coil for both phantom and cadaver show one order of mag-nitude SNR improvement compared with conventional scanners. The applications of electro-textiles are extended to antenna designs for body relevant communication systems such as Ultra-wideband (UWB) and microstrip patch antennas integrated with garments and deliver high-quality communications