Bei Zhang1, Andrew B. Rosenkrantz2, Daniel K. Sodickson1, Samir S. Taneja2, Cornel Stefanescu1, Graham C. Wiggins1
1The Bernard and Irene Schwartz Center for Biomedical Imaging, NYU Medical Center, New York, NY, United States; 2Department of Radiology, NYU Langone Medical Center, New York, NY, United States
Prostate imaging could benefit from the increased MR sensitivity at 7 Tesla, but such deep torso imaging is challenging due to extreme RF inhomogeneity and is relied on parallel transmit and RF shimming, which bring complexity to the equipment requirement and the acquisition of data. We propose that it is possible to achieve excitation in the prostate with only two transmitter elements. Traditional loops and radiative dipole antennas were evaluated through simulation, and simulations are used to help design and build a two-element transmit-receive plus six-channel receive-only array for prostate imaging at 7 Tesla and tested it in human imaging.