Abstract #2584

McKinnon G, Menon R, Pinkerton R

In the current study, we use a finite difference time domain method to simulate the electromagnetic radio frequency fields of a transceive surface coil array for parallel imaging optimization (specifically, cartesian SENSE). The SENSE optimized surface coil array gap size and acceleration factor is shown to be a function of the ratio of physiological-to-intrinsic noise sources. This ratio is experimentally verified to be approximately 1.3 resulting in an optimum gap size and SENSE acceleration factor of 0.25 and 2 (respectively) to be the optimum design of an 8 element transceive surface coil array for functional MRI at 4 T.