Custom-Fitted 16-Channel Bilateral Breast Coil for Bidirectional Parallel Imaging

摘要

A 16-channel receive-only, closely-fitted array coil is described and tested in vivo for bilateral breast imaging at 3T. The primary purpose of this coil is to provide high SNR 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. SENSE parallel imaging noise amplification (g-factor) was evaluated in phantom scans. In healthy volunteers we compared SNR, parallel imaging in one and two directions, 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 SNR 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.