Abstract #0294

Boesiger P, Buehrer M, Kozerke S

Large coil arrays with multiple independent coil elements are advantageous in parallel imaging. At this stage, however, data handling and increased computational effort lead to long reconstruction times. If an imaging region smaller than area covered by the array is targeted, it may be beneficial to select a subset of coil elements without significant SNR loss. In this work an efficient algorithm is presented which automatically determines an optimal element selection for a given imaging region. Given a cardiac 32-element array a considerable number of elements can be deactivated for parallel imaging of the coronary arteries without significant SNR loss.