RF coil design for improving human liver fat quantification in a portable single-side MR system.

Earlier diagnosis of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is important to prevent disease progression. Recently, a low-cost portable MR system was been developed as a point-of-care screening tool for in vivo liver fat quantification. However, subcutaneous fat may confound the liver fat quantification, particularly in the NAFLD population. In this work, we propose a novel RF coil design composed of a set of "saturation" coils sandwiching a main coil to improve human liver fat quantification. By comparison with conventional MRI, we demonstrate the capability and effectiveness of the novel RF coil design in phantom experiments as well as in vivo liver scans. In the phantom experiment, the saturation coil reduced the error of the measured proton density fat fraction (PDFF) results from 28.9% to 4.0%, and in the in-vivo experiment, it reduced the discrepancy of the PDFF results from 13.2% to 4.0%. The novel coil design together with the adapted CPMG-based sequence improves the practicability and robustness of the portable single-side MR system.