Matthew Finnerty1, Xiaoyu Yang1,
Tsinghua Zheng1, Jeremiah Heilman1, Nicholas Castrilla1,
Joseph Herczak1, Hiroyuki Fujita1,2, Graham C. Wiggins3,
Ryan Brown3, Guillaume Madelin3, Gregory Chang3,
Ravinder R. Regatte3, Michael Recht3, Siegfried
Trattnig4, Vladimir Juras4, Wolfgang Renz5,
Franz Schmitt5, Bernd Stoeckel6, Andreas Potthast5,
Karsten Wicklow5
1Quality Electrodynamics,
Mayfield Village, OH, United States; 2Departments of Physics &
Radiology, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, United States; 3Department
of Radiology, NYU Langone Medical Center, New York, United States; 4Department
of Radiology, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria; 5Siemens
Healthcare, Erlangen, Germany; 6Siemens Medical Solutions USA,
Inc., Malvern, PA, United States
The higher SNR found at 7T allows for more diagnostic applications for nuclei other than hydrogen. In particular, sodium imaging has been found to be useful in characterizing cartilage degeneration in the joints, with the focus primarily on the knee. In an effort to design RF coil hardware optimized for these x-nuclei applications, a 12-rung birdcage transmitter and 15-channel receive-only array coil has been developed for sodium imaging of the knee.