Caterpillar Traps
A new RF cable-trap design that uses many small resonant elements to keep cables flexible and safely attenuate shield currents.
Managing long cables that connect coil arrays to the MRI system is a persistent challenge. RF coupling of these cables to the main transmit coil can drive large shield currents that degrade coil performance, distort B1 homogeneity, and, most importantly, create safety risks such as heating and RF burns. Conventional cable traps are made stiff to keep their resonance frequency fixed, however, these traps limit the routing and flexibility of the coil cables. Instead of a few high-blocking traps, we proposed caterpillar traps, a distributed system of small, elastic traps that cover the full length of cables. We leverage an array of resonant toroids as traps, forming a caterpillar-like structure, where bending only minimally impacts individual traps. Caterpillar traps provide sufficient attenuation to shield currents while allowing cable flexibility. Our distributed design can provide high blocking efficiency at different positions and orientations, even in cases where commercial cable traps cannot. More details in our MRM paper.
