19-Channel Rx Array Coil and 4-Channel Tx Loop Array for Cervical Spinal Cord Imaging at 7T MRI

Wei Zhao¹, Julien Cohen-Adad¹, Jonathan R. Polimeni¹, Bastien Guerin¹, Boris Keil¹, Peter Serano¹, Azma Mareyam¹, Philipp Hoecht², Lawrence L. Wald¹

In this work, we developed a 19-channel receive array and a 4-channel parallel transmit loop array for imaging the cervical spinal cord at 7T. We addressed the challenge of obtaining uniform B1+ excitation by mounting a 4-channel degenerate-loop transmit array in the plane posterior to the subject similar to previous work. The 4-channel transmit loop array had the sufficient decoupling <-16dB between each element and produced a relatively uniform excitation when driven with a single amplifier with a 45 degree phase increment in each element. The receive array loops closely contoured to the body and yielded high SNR performance as well as the ability to accelerated EPI imaging with R=3 in the C-spine.