Boris Keil1, Azma Mareyam1, Kyoko
Fujimoto1, James N. Blau1, Veneta Tountcheva1,
Christina Triantafyllou1,2,
1A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical
Imaging, Department of Radiology, MGH, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown,
MA, United States; 2A.A. Martinos Imaging Center, Mc Govern
Institute for Brain Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States; 3Harvard-MIT
Division of Health Sciences and Technology, MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States
Compromising
the size and shape of pediatric brain arrays so that one size fits all or
using adult brain or knee arrays causes a significant degradation of SNR and
parallel imaging performance compared to a coil of the appropriate size and
shape for a given aged child. Unfortunately, rapid head growth in the first
years of life requires either a flexible array approach or multiple sizes
which span the size range with reasonable discrete increments. In this work,
we developed and tested four incremental sized 32-channel receive only head
coils for pediatric patients spanning an age range of 6 months to 7 years
old. The constructed coils show significant SNR gains for both accelerated
and unaccelerated imaging in pediatric brain imaging.
Keywords