An Optimized QD-Like 6-Channel Flexible and Ergonomic Shoulder Array Coil at 1.5T

Xiaoyu Yang¹, Steven Walk¹, Paul Taylor¹, Tsinghua Zheng¹, Hiroyuki Fujita^1,2

The MRI trend sees the increasing availability of wider-bore scanners at 1.5T and 3T to accommodate much broader coverage of the patient population. Addressing the need, an optimized 6-channel ergonomically-designed shoulder coil is proposed at 1.5T. The coil consists of 3 rows of loop and saddle pairs with flexible flaps for better fitting of different size shoulder sizes and thereby increasing SNR. Comparison tests were performed between the proposed flexible coil and a commercially available 4-channel rigid shoulder coil. The testing and evaluation also included the performance comparison among various shoulder sizes. The results show that the proposed one-fits-all coil provides good SNR, depth coverage and uniformity for the broad range patient population.