Boris Keil1, James N. Blau1, Philipp Hoecht2, Stephan Biber3, Michael Hamm3, Lawrence L. Wald1, 4
1A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, United States; 2Siemens, Medical Solutions USA, Charlestown, MA, United States; 3Siemens Healthcare, Erlangen, Germany; 4Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States
In brain imaging, parallel acquisition has impacted clinical applications to the point where nearly every brain examination is performed with an array comprising multiple smaller surface coil elements. In this study we design, construct, and evaluate a 64-channel brain array coil and compare it to a 32 channel coil, constructed with the same coil former geometry, in order to precisely isolate the benefit of the two-fold increase in array coil elements We validate the arrays with SNR and g-factor maps and accelerated in vivo imaging.