Highly Accelerated 7T Prostate Imaging using Parallel Imaging

Alexander J. E. Raaijmakers¹, Ozlem Ipek¹, Wouter Koning², Hugo Kroeze², Cecilia Possanzini³, Paul R. Harvey³, Dennis Klomp², Peter R. Luijten², Jan J. W. Lagendijk¹, Cornelis A. T. van den Berg¹

Prostate imaging at 7 Tesla suffers from high SAR levels and B1 signal attenuation. An array of 8 single-side adapted dipole antennas shows good signal coverage and is able to reduce the SAR levels by a factor of 4. In this work the parallel imaging performance of this array is characterized. The reference image is obtained by travelling wave imaging. GRE images are obtained using SENSE and reduction factors varying from 1 to 8. No folding artefacts are observed up to a reduction factor of 6 and g-factor values in the prostate stay within reasonable bounds for all reduction factors.