SENSE Accelerated MREIT with Optimized RF Coil Design

Lutfi Tugan Muftuler¹, Gang Chen¹, Mark J. Hamamura¹, Orhan Nalcioglu¹

SENSE imaging technique is adapted to MR Electrical Impedance Tomography (MREIT) to shorten acquisition times. A phased array coil was designed and optimized for this application and MREIT data was reconstructed from the SENSE accelerated images. A quasi-intrinsic decoupling scheme was used to minimize couplings between coil elements and the geometry was optimized to achieve high and uniform SNR. Data was acquired with and without SENSE acceleration and the results were compared. Phantom studies demonstrated that conductivity maps could be reconstructed from MREIT data acquired with 2.7 times SENSE acceleration with no discernible artifacts.