A Multi-Element Receive Coil Array for MRI/FMRI of Awake Behaving Marmosets

Hellmut Merkle¹, Julie B. Mackel¹, Junjie V. Liu¹, Yoshiyuki Hirano¹, Afonso C. Silva¹

Significant effort has been placed on the development of awake behaving animals that allow longitudinal studies to be carried out without the confounds of anesthesia. Here we describe a 7-element receive coil array for MRI/FMRI scanning of awake behaving marmosets at 7 Tesla incorporated into individualized noninvasive helmet restraints and integrated to low input impedance RF preamplifiers. Excellent isolation between the coils and spatial coverage of the whole brain were achieved. The SNR was optimized to the somatosensory and motor cortices. Further refinements of the helmet restraint will lead to additional geometries optimized for different brain regions.