Yen-Liang Liu1, 2, Yun-An Huang1, In-Tsang Lin1, Hong-Chang Yang3, Jyh-Horng Chen1, 4
1Interdisciplinary MRI/MRS Lab, Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; 2Graduate Institute of Biomedical Electronics and Bioinformatics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; 3Department of Physics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; 4Graduate Institute of Biomedical Electronics and Bioinformatics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
A 4cm high-temperature superconducting (HTS) radio-frequency (RF) coil platform was applied on the fMRI study in a 7T MRI system. Not only the image SNR but also the functional SNR were improved due to reduced thermal noise. Compared to a similar home-made copper RF coil, this study obtained an approximate twice SNR gain in both fast spin echo and echo planar imaging (EPI) sequences. The time-series analysis of the resting state fMRI study showed that not only the functional SNR was raised but also the functional connectivity was improved.