In Vivo Receive Sensitivity Measurement

Jinghua Wang¹, Maolin Qiu¹, June Watzl¹, Robin de Graff¹, Robert Todd Constable¹

Inhomogeneous receive sensitivity, which is object-dependent, strongly affects the uniformity of MRI signal intensity acquired with parallel imaging techniques at high field. Various methods have been proposed to estimate the receive sensitivity in order to reduce spatial variations in signal intensity caused by the receive sensitivity nonuniformities. A primary challenge is to separate the contribution of tissue contrast, inhomogeneous transmit field and receive sensitivity to signal intensity. Here, we propose a novel rotating object method to estimate the receive sensitivity of a transmit/receive coil. The proposed method is validated using phantom experiments at 4.0 and 7.0 T.