Custom-Fitted 16-Channel Bilateral Breast Coil for Bidirectional Parallel Imaging MAGNETIC RESONANCE IN MEDICINE Nnewihe, A. N., Grafendorfer, T., Daniel, B. L., Calderon, P., Alley, M. T., Robb, F., Hargreaves, B. A. 2011; 66 (1): 281-289

Abstract

A 16-channel receive-only, closely fitted array coil is described and tested in vivo for bilateral breast imaging at 3 T. The primary purpose of this coil is to provide high signal-to-noise ratio and parallel imaging acceleration in two directions for breast MRI. Circular coil elements (7.5-cm diameter) were placed on a closed "cup-shaped" platform, and nearest neighbor coils were decoupled through geometric overlap. Comparisons were made between the 16-channel custom coil and a commercially available 8-channel coil. SENSitivity Encoding (SENSE) parallel imaging noise amplification (g-factor) was evaluated in phantom scans. In healthy volunteers, we compared signal-to-noise ratio, parallel imaging in one and two directions, Autocalibrating Reconstruction for Cartesian sampling (ARC) g-factor, and high spatial resolution imaging. When compared with a commercially available 8-channel coil, the 16-channel custom coil shows 3.6× higher mean signal-to-noise ratio in the breast and higher quality accelerated images. In patients, the 16-channel custom coil has facilitated high-quality, high-resolution images with bidirectional acceleration of R = 6.3.

View details for DOI 10.1002/mrm.22771

View details for Web of Science ID 000292425100034

View details for PubMedID 21287593

View details for PubMedCentralID PMC3128917