Abstract #4401

Theoretical Signal-to-Noise Penalty in Parallel Ultra-Low-Field Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Fa-Hsuan Lin^1,2, Panu Vesanen³, Jaakko O. Nieminen³, John W. Belliveau², Risto J. Ilmoniemi³

¹Institute of Biomedical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; ²Martinos Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United States; ³Department of Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science (BECS), Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

In ultra-low-field (ULF) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a readily available sensory array consisting of up to hundreds of detectors can be used for simultaneous data acquisition. Such a parallel data acquisition immediately allows the application of the parallel MRI principle to reduce the data acquisition time, which critically depends on the number of magnetization polarization steps in ULF-MRI. In this study, we investigate the theoretical signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) penalty based on the Sensitivity Encoded (SENSE) MRI at various acceleration rates using the optimized MEG array with different channels of pick-up coils.