Tsinghua Zheng1, Craig Lawrie1,
Xiaoyu Yang1, Joseph Herczak1, Paul Taylor1,
Hiroyuki Fujita1,2, Takahiro Ishihara3, Kazuya Okamoto3,
Sadanori Tomiha3, Kaori Togashi4, Tomohisa Okada4
1Quality Electrodynamics, LLC, Mayfield
Village, OH, United States; 2Departments of Physics and Radiology,
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, United States; 3Toshiba
Medical Systems Corporation, Otawara, Tochigi, Japan; 4Department
of Diagnostic Imaging and Nuclear Medicine, Kyoto University Graduate School
of Medicine, Kyoto, Japan
We
have developed a 3-Tesla head array with an integrated local birdcage
transmit coil and 32-receive surface coils for much higher spatial and
temporal resolution head imaging. The coil was tested on a Toshiba 3T Atlas
32-Channel MRI System. Benchmarking with a commercially-available 1.5-Tesla
14-channel receive-only head array coil, the proposed Tx-and-32Rx head coil
showed a significant improvement in image quality with respect to the SNR
enhancement and much improved temporal resolution that are well expected from
a higher channel count array coil.