Multinuclear RF coil for 13C and 1H breast MR imaging at 3.0 T

Hyperpolarized ¹³C MRI enables the investigation of metabolism of breast lesions for diagnosis and to monitor disease progression. Acquiring ¹³C MR images along with ¹H MR images using a multi-nuclear RF coil enables accurate co-registration of the images, thereby providing complementary structural and functional images. In this work, we propose a design for multinuclear ¹³C-¹H RF coil array for breast MR imaging, and assess the performance using both RF and MRI measurements. Both ¹³C and ¹H MR images were obtained of using phantoms.