A large number of coils is desirable in parallel transmission to achieve uniform excitation while controlling SAR in a subject-adaptive manner, but only a small number of transmit channels are available on most ultra-high field scanners. We describe an algorithm that optimally groups a large number of coils into a small number of channels, based on the fact that if two coils are in the same channel, the matrix formed by collecting their slice-by-slice RF shims will have rank one. The algorithm was used to optimize the coil-to-channel mappings of a 30-coil array at 7T, based on 8 representative heads.
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