Vijayanand Alagappan1,2, Graham Charles Wiggins3, Jonathan Rizzo Polimeni3, Lawrence Leroy Wald3,4
1Department of Radiology, A.A Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, MA, USA; 2Department of Biomedical engineering, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA; 3Department of Radiology, A.A Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, MA, USA; 4Health Science and Technology, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA
We describe a 32 channel receive-only 3T phased array head coil for the pediatric population. The 32-channel coil was built on a close fitting fiberglass helmet with soccer-ball element geometry. SNR gains of 4 and 2 times in the cortex and 1.2 and 2 times in the center of the head were observed when compared to a commercial 32-channel adult head coil and a 12-channel adult head coil. The Maximum G factors were also reduced significantly with the 32-channel coil optimized for the pediatric head imaging.
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