Doubly tuned solenoidal resonators for small animal imaging and spectroscopy at 1.5 Tesla

The design and construction of solenoidal resonators for use with small animals in a 1.5-Tesla clinical imaging system are described. The coils have been designed to exploit the B1 distributions of two resonant modes of a four-turn solenoid whose windings are in parallel. Both singly and doubly tuned versions have been constructed. 1H images of normal and pathologic anatomy in mice and rats as well as a 31P spectrum of a Walker 256 rat sarcoma are presented. A primary advantage of this design is that the coils are easy to build and implement while providing the necessary sensitivity to allow high quality images to be obtained with no changes to the hardware or software of the clinical unit.