William Dominguez-Viqueira1, Angus Z. Lau1,2,
Albert P. Chen3, Charles H. Cunningham2,4
1Imaging Research ,
Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; 2Medical
Biophysics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; 3GE
Healthcare, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; 4Imaging Research,
Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Hyperpolarized-13C substrates has become a promising tool to study real-time cardiac-metabolism in-vivo. For such fast imaging it is important to optimize the RF-coils to obtain the best signal-to-noise ratio possible. A single-channel transmit/receive surface-coil for hyperpolarized-13C was characterized with benchtop and in-vivo measurements. SNR of up to 40 units was measure in-vivo, and further improvement throughout the volume of interest can be achieved by using the dual-channel surface-coil simulated in this work. This will allow imaging of the different metabolite signals even in the posterior regions of the myocardium, which is not possible at this moment with the single-channel surface-coil.