Coil Array Compression in Coronary MRA

Johannes Frieder Schmidt¹, Martin Buehrer¹, Peter Boesiger¹, Sebastian Kozerke¹

SNR limits the spatial resolution necessary for coronary MRA. Higher SNR is provided by large coil arrays, but at the expense of increased data sizes for image reconstruction. This work demonstrates the applicability of coil array compression for coronary imaging which uses a linear combination of channels to compress the data to a reduced set of virtual coils. In 10 healthy volunteers, it is shown for various compression factors that the visible image quality remains comparable. For a compression factor of 8, the relative loss in SNR on the coronaries is 5%.