Abstract #2448

McDougall M, Steele-Russell I, Wright S, Russell M, Yallapragada N

Microcoils are used to increase the SNR in high-resolution microscopy imaging, with the intrinsic disadvantage that they cover a limited field-of-view. This paper presents a large-scale (FOV) microscopy system comprised of a 64-channel array of microcoils (enabling a large FOV in the phase-encode direction) and a 64-channel broadband receiver (enabling a large FOV in the frequency-encode direction). Conventional surface coil and array images with the same field-of-view and resolution were compared. Despite an imaging time of only nine seconds for the array image as compared to 2.13 minutes for the conventional image, a factor of three higher SNR was achieved.