Scott B. King1, Mike J. Smith1,
Boguslaw Tomanek2
1Institute for
Biodiagnostics, National Research Council of
The number of receive channels on clinical MRI systems is now as high as 128, allowing the possibility for highly accelerated parallel MRI and increased SNR. To lessen the demands for data handling and processing, data compression methods are being explored. Here eigenmode channel compression was investigated for complex volume array designs revealing that significant (N/2) channel compression is possible while retaining >95% SNR and showing that symmetric, uniformly distributed array elements, as in the 24-channel head array, leads to more degeneracy and quad/antiqued pairs, and ultimately, whole-volume channel compression is possible, making permanent hardware channel compression an option.