1A.A.
Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital,
Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, United States; 2Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States; 3Division
of Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard-MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States
Ultra-high field MRI can potentially improve diagnostic power using a coil setup consisting of a pTx array and a separate multi-channel Rx array. 32-channel receive arrays have been widely used in 7T brain MRI for improving sensitivity and parallel imaging performance. The use of simultaneous reception with multiple coils to speed-up encoding, has proven to be a requirement for obtaining high spatial resolution fMRI at 7T. Therefore, for improving the image quality of the pTx system, we combined a 16-channel transmit array and a 32-channel receive array with the ability for highly accelerated encoding and to perform parallel transmit excitations.