Complementary-Bowtie-Aperture Inspired Wearable Metasurfaces for boosting SNR in 1.5T MRI systems

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is one of the prominent non-invasive diagnostic tools for clinical imaging of human body tissues. The performance parameter of MRI i.e. signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be boosted by increasing the applied static magnetic field (Bo). However, high magnetization inside the scanners could cause potential safety concerns for patients with metallic implants. Metasurfaces have the ability to locally boost the magnetic field without the need of stepping up the B0 inside MRI scanners, but those in the literature cannot conform to different human body parts. Here, we propose a complementary bowtie aperture-inspired flexible metasurface that can boost the SNR of 1. 5 T MRI by ~4.5 times on the surface of scanned subject. Full-wave simulations of conformed shapes of metasurface depict that the metasurface can be used as a “wearable add-on” inside MRI transceiver arrays for obtaining high quality scanned images of different body parts such as head, legs, etc.