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Abstract #0431

19-Channel Rx Array Coil and 4-Channel Tx Loop Array for Cervical Spinal Cord Imaging at 7T MRI

MAGNA25Wei Zhao1, Julien Cohen-Adad1, Jonathan R. Polimeni1, Bastien Guerin1, Boris Keil1, Peter Serano1, Azma Mareyam1, Philipp Hoecht2, Lawrence L. Wald1

1Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Dept. of Radiology Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, United States; 2Siemens Medical Solutions USA Inc., Charlestown, MA, United States

In this work, we developed a 19-channel receive array and a 4-channel parallel transmit loop array for imaging the cervical spinal cord at 7T. We addressed the challenge of obtaining uniform B1+ excitation by mounting a 4-channel degenerate-loop transmit array in the plane posterior to the subject similar to previous work. The 4-channel transmit loop array had the sufficient decoupling <-16dB between each element and produced a relatively uniform excitation when driven with a single amplifier with a 45 degree phase increment in each element. The receive array loops closely contoured to the body and yielded high SNR performance as well as the ability to accelerated EPI imaging with R=3 in the C-spine.

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Keywords

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