CoilGen – an Open Source MR Coil Layout Generator

The CoilGen is an automated and flexible algorithm for generating realizable MR gradient and shim coil layouts. The benefit is to reduce post processing effort and thus enable for rapid prototyping of new MRI/NMR coil designs.

For a given surface mesh and target field, the algorithm generates a connected, non-overlapping wire path. It is based on a boundary element method and generates an interconnected non-overlapping wire-tracks on 3D support structures. The focus of this work is post processing.

The user must specify a target field (e.g., bz(x,y,z)=y for a constant gradient in the y-direction) and a surface mesh geometry (e.g., a cylinder defined in an .stl file). The code then generates a coil layout in the form of a non-overlapping, interconnected wire trace to achieve the desired field.