Clinical Imaging at 7T with a 16 Channel Whole Body Coil and 32 Receive Channels

J Thomas Vaughan¹, Carl Snyder¹, Lance Delabarre¹, Jinfeng Tian¹, Gregor Adriany¹, Peter Andersen¹, John Strupp¹, Kamil Ugurbil¹

Reported is the first demonstration of clinical mode whole body imaging at 7T, using a body coil for best uniformity together with local receivers for improved sensitivity. Body imaging at 7T however requires new technology and methods to mitigate the severe RF artifacts encountered by conventional approaches. To achieve safe and successful body images, an actively detuned, 16-channel TEM body coil was used together with a pair of 8 channel receive arrays. B1 shimming was employed to optimize the RF field over the ROI. 32 combined channels from the body coil and the receive arrays were used to maximize signal.