Image acceleration in parallel magnetic resonance imaging by means of metamaterial magnetoinductive lenses

Parallel Magnetic Resonance imaging (pMRI) is an image acceleration technique which takes advantage of localized sensitivities of multiple receivers. In this letter, we show that metamaterial lenses based on capacitively-loaded rings can provide higher localization of coil sensitivities compared to conventional loop designs. Several lens designs are systematically analyzed in order to find the structure providing higher signal-to-noise-ratio. The magnetoinductive (MI) lens has been found to be the optimum structure and an experiment is developed to show it. The ability of the MI lens for pMRI is investigated by means of the parameter known in the MRI community as g-Factor.