32-channel 3 Tesla receive-only phased-array head coil with soccer-ball element geometry.

A 32-channel 3T receive-only phased-array head coil was developed for human brain imaging. The helmet-shaped array was designed to closely fit the head with individual overlapping circular elements arranged in patterns of hexagonal and pentagonal symmetry similar to that of a soccer ball. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and noise amplification (g-factor) in accelerated imaging applications were quantitatively evaluated in phantom and human images and compared with commercially available head coils. The 32-channel coil showed SNR gains of up to 3.5-fold in the cortex and 1.4-fold in the corpus callosum compared to a (larger) commercial eight-channel head coil. The experimentally measured g-factor performance of the helmet array showed significant improvement compared to the eight-channel array (peak g-factor 59% and 26% of the eight-channel values for four- and fivefold acceleration). The performance of the arrays is demonstrated in high-resolution and highly accelerated brain images.

Improved multi-station peripheral MR angiography with a dedicated vascular coil.

Delineation of small branch vessels can be crucial for assessing the peripheral arterial system of patients requiring surgical grafting. Thus signal-to-noise needs to be maximized. We evaluated the performance of a dedicated peripheral vascular coil in four subjects by comparing it to the body coil using DSA as the standard of reference. SNR and CNR values of the dedicated peripheral coil exceeded those obtained with the body coil by a mean of 398%, thus permitting improved delineation of the infrapopliteal arterial morphology.

Dedicated phased-array coil for peripheral MRA.

In this paper we introduce a phased-array coil dedicated for MRA of peripheral arteries which covers the upper and lower legs. The structure of this coil includes a solid cabinet with four flexible wings forming a "T." The flexibility of the wings allows adaptation to the individual leg size. There are eight circularly polarized channels, four on each side. This coil is compatible with other surface coils. For MRA of peripheral arteries, it is combined with the body phased-array coil and the spine array coil which cover the lower abdomen and the pelvis. We examined six patients using this coil combination. The image quality, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) of these examinations were compared with that of peripheral MRA examinations obtained with the body resonator. Image quality with the array coil was considerably improved in comparison with the body resonator examinations. The SNR and CNR increased approximately 100%. The handling of this coil was very quick and simple, similar to the procedure with other surface coils. The use of dedicated phased-array coils for peripheral MRA may be an important step toward the establishment of MR digital subtraction angiography (DSA) as a non-invasive alternative to intra-arterial DSA in the visualization of peripheral arteries. Its potential has to be evaluated in future studies.

A 16-element phased-array head coil.

Volume-array coils offer increased signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) over standard volume coils near the array elements while preserving the SNR at the center of the volume. As the number of array elements is increased, the SNR advantage as well as the complexity of actually constructing the array increases also. In this study, a 16-channel receive-only array for imaging of the brain is demonstrated and compared to a circularly polarized (CP) head coil of similar shape and diameter. The array was formed from a 2 x 8 grid of square elements placed on a cylindrical form. Mutual coupling was minimized by a combination of overlapping element placement and current-reducing matching networks. Simultaneous data acquisition from the 16 individual elements was performed using a four-channel receiver system with each channel time domain multiplexed by a factor of 4. Theoretical and experimental comparisons between the array and a standard CP head coil show that the array offers an increase in SNR of nearly a factor of 3 near its surface while maintaining a comparable SNR to that of the CP head coil in the center of the region of interest.

Calculation of the signal-to-noise ratio for simple surface coils and arrays of coils.

This paper describes a new method to calculate the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of MR signals obtained from single receiver coils and arrays of receiver coils. The coils are assumed to be place on the surface of a conducting half-space and the SNR is sample-noise dominated. While in conventional methods line integrals over the electric currents in the coils are chosen to calculate the electric and magnetic fields, this new method uses surface integrals over magnetic dipoles covering the area enclosed by the antenna to derive these fields. Using this method, the SNR for simple circular and square coils was analytically calculated. The calculations show that the theoretical difference in SNR between circular and square antennas is very low. Furthermore, based on the new method, a derivation of the ultimate gain in SNR for arrays of surface coils is presented. The SNR of such an array approaches a limit even if the total number of coils is increased to infinity. This ultimate SNR of a coil array is 35.8% above that of a single circular-shaped, size-optimized and linear polarized coil.

Design of matching networks for low noise preamplifiers.

This paper discusses matching networks that minimize inductive coupling between the antennas within an array while simultaneously insuring minimum noise contributions from preamplifiers. Typical low noise preamplifier designs require a strong mismatch between the source impedance and the amplifier input impedance (reflection coefficient close to one) to achieve optimal noise performance. This is in contrast to the familiar impedance match known from communication theory where input and source impedances have complex conjugate values for maximizing the power transfer from source to amplifier. The high input reflection coefficient of low noise amplifiers can be exploited to reduce antenna currents by using lossless impedance transformations to create a high impedance at the coil terminals while simultaneously maintaining a low noise figure for the amplifier. The networks presented here constitute an improvement over previous work because they give additional freedoms regarding the values of the network components and the amplifier input impedance. The technique has been formalized and coded in MathCad, making the design of realizable networks a simple process.