Randy Giaquinto1, Wolfgang Loew1, Suraj Serai1, Jean Tkach1, Kathleen Emery1, Charles Dumoulin1
1Imaging Research Center, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, United States
Single channel flex coils or adult sized knee/wrist coils are currently used for imaging the pediatric elbow. This frequently results in uncomfortable patient positioning, patient motion, poor fat suppression and degraded images. Furthermore, the use of single loop or simple volume coils prevent the use of accelerated imaging based upon parallel imaging strategies. In this work, we present a novel eight-channel phased array coil built on a lightweight polycarbonate frame. This coil has improved SNR over flex coils used in our institution and overcomes the challenges of cross-coil coupling in a three-dimensional array construction.