Walid Elias Kyriakos1,2, Ehud Schmidt1,3, Ferenc A. Jolesz1,4, Robert V. Mulkern1,5
1Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; 2Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA; 3Radiology, Partners, Boston, MA, USA; 4Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA; 5Radiology, Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA
Parallel MRI utilizes multiple RF receiver coils as encoding engines, whereby the spatial sensitivity profiles of these coils is used in unison with phase encoding to obtain higher accelerations with reduced folding artifacts. The current state-of-the-art in electronics and manufacturing allows construction of coil arrays with a greater and greater number of similarly shaped coil elements, resulting in a considerable increase in data volume., and leading to overload of computational resources and impractical image reconstruction times. In this work, we show that it is possible to follow a simple intuitive approach, to reduce the size of the array without loss of image quality or acceleration speed by linearly combining subsets of small coils into larger coil elements, where these elements have differing sizes.