Meeting Banner
Abstract #0643

Age-Optimized 32-Channel Brain Arrays for 3T Pediatric Imaging

Boris Keil1, Azma Mareyam1, Kyoko Fujimoto1, James N. Blau1, Veneta Tountcheva1, Christina Triantafyllou1,2, Lawrence L. Wald1,3

1A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, MGH, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, United States; 2A.A. Martinos Imaging Center, Mc Govern Institute for Brain Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States; 3Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States


Compromising the size and shape of pediatric brain arrays so that one size fits all or using adult brain or knee arrays causes a significant degradation of SNR and parallel imaging performance compared to a coil of the appropriate size and shape for a given aged child. Unfortunately, rapid head growth in the first years of life requires either a flexible array approach or multiple sizes which span the size range with reasonable discrete increments. In this work, we developed and tested four incremental sized 32-channel receive only head coils for pediatric patients spanning an age range of 6 months to 7 years old. The constructed coils show significant SNR gains for both accelerated and unaccelerated imaging in pediatric brain imaging.