Abstract #1378

Hargreaves B, Conolly S, Li L, Chen A

Field gradients near air-tissue susceptibility interfaces can lead to artifacts including poor fat suppression, image shifts, blurring, ordropouts. External water bags can remove the susceptibility gradient from the imaging volume, but these are heavy and are incompatible withembedded RF coils. Here we introduce a pyrolytic graphite foam that matches human tissue susceptibility, is ten times less dense thanwater, and is compatible with embedded RF coil arrays, includingphased array and SENSE arrays. PG foams could significantly improve the robustness of MRI near the skin, especially for high field MRI, b-SSFP, and spectroscopy.