Abstract #2582

Talagala L, Duyn J, Bandettini P, Bodurka J

MRI receiver and reception system quality directly influences MRI sensitivity. It has been established that birdcage-type volume RF coil sensitivity less than that of an array of surface coils. Previously, the SNR and noise amplification factor (g-factor) performance of a home-built 16-element gapped receive-only brain array coil have been evaluated at 3 Tesla with a custom built high bandwidth digital MRI receiver. However, the 16-element array SNR performance was compared to other arrays with different number of elements by software combination of individual channels. Here, we present an experimental comparison of SNR between images acquired with separate 16 and 8 element receive-only gapped arrays and the standard birdcage head coil using a commercially available MRI scanner. Compared with a birdcage coil, the 16 element close fitting array provides a 2.7-fold SNR increase over the whole brain, 5.7 fold increase in the brain periphery and 1.8 fold increase in the brain center. Compared with an 8-element