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Abstract #0860

Comparison of New Element Designs For Combined RF-Shim Arrays at 7T

Simone Angela Winkler 1 , Jason P Stockmann 2 , Paul A Warr 3 , Boris Keil 2 , Lawrence L Wald 2,4 , and Brian K Rutt 1

1 Dept. of Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States, 2 A. A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, Massachusetts, United States, 3 Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, University of Bristol, Clifton, United Kingdom, 4 Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Combining RF and B0 shim functions into a single array is an appealing approach which allows highly flexible matrix B0 shimming while preserving closely fitting, high channel count receive array elements. The standard approach is to add chokes to bypass all loop capacitors to allow the DC current to flow around the loop, but this introduces additional loss, heating, RF field perturbation, bulk and construction complexity. We report on the analysis (by theory, simulation, and experiment) of several new combined RF-shim element designs, with particular focus on SNR performance. We particularly investigated two new loop designs concentric and coaxial types and compared these to the standard chokes and RF-only loop types. We conclude that both new loop types provide viable solutions for RF-shim loop architectures at 7T.

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