Helen Marshall1, Patrick M. Devine1, Nishanthan Shanmugaratnam2, Cameron Piron2, Donald B. Plewes1
1Division of Imaging Research, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Toronto, ON, Canada; 2Sentinelle Medical Inc, Toronto, ON, Canada
The achievable signal to noise ratio and parallel imaging performance of a given imaging sequence are strongly dependent on the radio-frequency coil array used to collect the data. Two commercially available 8-element coils and a prototype 16-element coil were compared. Their performance for both conventional and SENSE-accelerated imaging was assessed in terms of SNR, g-factor and uniformity. The 8-element coil with adjustable coils had the highest SNR, the 8-element coil with a fixed coil arrangement had the best uniformity, and the 16-element coil enabled superior acceleration in the superior-inferior direction in addition to the left-right direction compared to either 8-element coil.