A QUIET GRADIENT-COIL SET EMPLOYING OPTIMIZED, FORCE-SHIELDED, DISTRIBUTED COIL DESIGNS

A distributed coil design is described which employs active force shielding to reduce acoustic noise. Both axial and transverse gradients employ sets of distributed pairs of coplanar closed-are loops whose planes are normal to the static magnetic field direction. The resulting gradients are also partially magnetically screened. The design results in an axially compact coil set that provides linear gradients which extend over greater fractions of the enclosed volume than previous designs. The minimal gradient field interaction with the patient inherent in this force-shielded transverse-gradient coil design provides intrinsically safer G(x) and G(y) gradient fields. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.