Once a coil is ready to make the fist pictures a few test with phantoms have to be made. In this case the phantom is a big round cylinder (like a Dutch cheese) filled with a liquid that produces a bright homogeny image.

To see for instance the spatial sensitivity of the new coil a picture of the phantom is taken by that coil. The phantom is homogeneously excited by the MR systems build-in transmitting coil, but the new receiving coil is more sensitive in some regions. This can be seen, if no sensitivity correction is made.

The first picture I made was taken with only one element instead of complete three element array:

The elliptic shape with the two dark areas is exactly what is expected for a circular coil. The two pictures are perpendicular. (Move the mouse on a picture to see a red line that marks the position of the other image!)

After it was clear that one coil element works the next step could be taken: The combination of the three elements to one array. The elements in the array have a certain overlap to magnetically decouple them. This will of course increase the sensitivity in the overlapped region, which can be seen in phantom studies with the 3 element array:

Phantom image with tree elements

(Again you can move the mouse on a picture to see a red line that marks the position of the other image!)

The next step was to make pictures. To scan a human would be to dangerous, so we started with some
orange test pictures »