A flexible five-channel shielded-coaxial-cable (SCC) transceive neck coil for high-resolution carotid imaging at 7T

Purpose Imaging the carotid arteries at 7T ideally requires a flexible multichannel array that allows B1-shimming and conforms to different neck sizes. The major challenge is to minimize coupling between closely spaced coils and to make the coupling relatively insensitive to loading conditions. Methods We have designed a five-channel flexible transceive array composed of shielded-coaxial-cable coils placed on the anterior part of the neck and conforming to the anatomy. In vivo imaging of the carotid arteries in three subjects has been performed. Results The measured noise correlation matrices show the decoupling level between the individual elements to be -12.5 dB and better. Anatomical localizer imaging of the carotids shows both carotids in every subject well visualized after B1-shimming. In vivo black-blood, carotid images were acquired with very high in-plane spatial resolution (0.25 x 0.25 mm(2)) with clear depiction of the vessel walls. Conclusions The flexibility of the proposed coil has been demonstrated by imaging subjects with different neck circumferences. To the best of our knowledge, the in-plane resolution of 0.25 x 0.25 mm(2) is the highest reported at 7T.