Yudong Zhu1, Xu Chu2, Chengtao Cao2, Eric Fiveland3, Randy Giaquinto3, Tingting Song2, Xing Yang2, Cheng Zhang2, Joseph Piel3, Keith Park3
1New York University Langone Medical Center, New York, USA; 2GE Global Research Center, Shanghai, China; 3GE Global Research Center, Niskayuna, NY, USA
Parallel RF transmission supports flexible spatiotemporal coil current control with multiple sources driving a distributed RF coil structure, and promises to address major challenges facing conventional transmission in high field MR. This study explores substantially distributed parallel Tx, aiming at its applications in reducing RF power dissipation in the subject / the coil structure, as well as in B1 shimming / accelerated parallel excitation of an arbitrarily oriented target slice or volume. We developed a cost effective 32-channel exciter module, RF coil arrays that support 32-channel parallel Tx and Rx, and 32 current-source amplifiers that facilitate coil current control.