Sahil Bhatia1,
Gabriel Searles2, Dmitriy Londarskiy2, Tom E. Zink2,
Darren Gregan2, Tae-Young Yang2, Bijay Shah3,
Yun-Jeong Stickle2
1GE
Healthcare, Aurora, OH, United States; 2G.E. Healthcare, Aurora,
OH, United States; 3G.E. Healthcare, Waukesha, WI, United States
MR-PET combines the advantages of MRIs morphological imaging with excellent soft tissue contrast and PETs functional imaging. Integrated MR-PET scanners offer several advantages over sequential scanners such as reduction in overall scan time and elimination of patient repositioning. In an integrated MR-PET system, phased array surface coils are directly in the PET field of view and attenuate positrons resulting in artifacts and poor quality PET images. This paper presents a head neck coil at 3T designed specifically to be transparent to PET positrons. Significant improvements in PET sensitivity loss are shown without loss in MR performance.