Graham Wiggins1, Bei Zhang1, Qi Duan1, Riccardo Lattanzi1, Stephan Biber2, Bernd Stoeckel3, Kellyanne McGorty1, Daniel K. Sodickson1
1Radiology, Center for Biomedical Imaging, NYU School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA; 2Siemens Healthcare, Erlangen, Germany; 3Siemens Medical Solutions USA Inc., New York, NY, USA
Full wave electromagnetic simulations were used to explore design options for a 4-element transmit and 8 element receive array for imaging the carotid arteries in humans at 7 Tesla. By phasing the excitation of the transmit elements, B1+ excitation efficiency at the depth of the carotids was improved. The simulations suggested shifting the transmit and receive elements relative to each other to account for the twisting B1+ and B1- fields at 7T. A carotid array was constructed based on these observations, and was compared to a similar receive array at 3 Tesla. Substantial SNR gains were observed.