Boris Keil1, Stephan
Biber2, Robert Rehner2, Veneta Tountcheva1,
Kathrin Wohlfarth2, Philipp Hoecht3, Michael Hamm3,
Heiko Meyer2, Hubertus Fischer2,
1A. A. Martinos
Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General
Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, USA; 2Siemens
Healthcare, Erlangen, Germany; 3Siemens Healthcare, Charlestown,
MA, USA; 4Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences &
Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Highly parallel array coils have been applied to the brain to improve sensitivity of accelerated and non-accelerated imaging, but also offer the possibility to extend the coverage to the neck and C-spine. We have developed a new head-neck-Cspine coil with 60 elements (with 4 additional elements used from the spine array) to improve the sensitivity of integrated head, neck and C-spine examinations. We validate the array with SNR and g-factor maps and accelerated imaging up to R=9