Abstract #4354

A Five Channel Receive Array for Cardiac Imaging Using Hyperpolarized 13C at 3T.

William Dominguez-Viqueira¹, Angus Z. Lau¹, Albert P. Chen², Charles H. Cunningham¹,³

¹Imaging, Sunnybrook Research Institute, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; ²GE Healthcare, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; ³Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Hyperpolarized-13C substrates have become a promising tool to study real-time cardiac-metabolism in-vivo. Multi-channel receiver systems can provide similar SNR performance to a single surface coil, but with increased coverage. A single channel and a 5-channel array ¹³C receive coil were simulated in Matlab and compared with in-vivo measurements. SNR improvements at the base of the heart, were achieved by using the 5-channel coil array. This coil array may be suitable for human cardiac ¹³C studies and parallel imaging reconstruction in the near future.