Multiplexed RF Transmission for Transceiver Arrays at 7T

Hoby Patrick Hetherington¹, Nikolai I. Avdievich¹, Jullie W. Pan¹

At 7T single drive volume coils suffer from poor homogeneity and low efficiency. Transceiver arrays using small surface coils provide improved homogeneity and transmission efficiency; however their use is limited by longitudinal coverage. This can be overcome by using multiple rows of coils along the z axis. However this approach requires an increasing number of independent transmit channels (one per coil), which is not available on most clinical platforms and is expensive. The goal of this work was to develop pulse sequence methods that enable small numbers of independent transmit channels to drive transceiver arrays with larger numbers of coils.