A Novel Phased Array Coil for Limb Imaging Incorporating 3D Coil Overlaps

Randy Giaquinto¹, Wolfgang Loew¹, Suraj Serai¹, Jean Tkach¹, Kathleen Emery¹, Charles Dumoulin¹

Single channel flex coils or adult sized knee/wrist coils are currently used for imaging the pediatric elbow. This frequently results in uncomfortable patient positioning, patient motion, poor fat suppression and degraded images. Furthermore, the use of single loop or simple volume coils prevent the use of accelerated imaging based upon parallel imaging strategies. In this work, we present a novel eight-channel phased array coil built on a lightweight polycarbonate frame. This coil has improved SNR over flex coils used in our institution and overcomes the challenges of cross-coil coupling in a three-dimensional array construction.