Journal
MAGNETIC RESONANCE MATERIALS IN PHYSICS BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE
Volume 21, Issue 1-2, Pages 53-61Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10334-007-0100-4
Keywords
RF-coil; TEM coil; high field MRI; SNR; B-1 field
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Objective To evaluate a transverse electromagnetic (TEM), a circularly polarized (CP) (birdcage), and a 12-channel phased array head coil at the clinical field strength of B (0) = 3T in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), signal homogeneity, and maps of the effective flip angle alpha. Materials and methods SNR measurements were performed on low flip angle gradient echo images. In addition, flip angle maps were generated for alpha(nominal) = 30 degrees using the double angle method. These evaluation steps were performed on phantom and human brain data acquired with each coil. Moreover, the signal intensity variation was computed for phantom data using five different regions of interest. Results In terms of SNR, the TEM coil performs slightly better than the CP coil, but is second to the smaller 12-channel coil for human data. As expected, both the TEM and the CP coils show superior image intensity homogeneity than the 12-channel coil, and achieve larger mean effective flip angles than the combination of body and 12-channel coil with reduced radio frequency power deposition. Conclusion At 3T the benefits of TEM coil design over conventional lumped element(s) coil design start to emerge, though the phased array coil retains an advantage with respect to SNR performance.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available