The Dual Purpose CAPTAIN (Cardiac Adult / Pediatric Torso Assembly for in-vivo Imaging)

Modhurin Banerjee¹, Clyve Konrad Follante¹, Aleksey Zemskov¹, Rodney Bills¹, Kolman Juhasz¹, Steven G. Lee¹, Victor Taracila¹, Fraser Robb¹

It is current practice to use adult coil systems for pediatric imaging, which is problematic due to a variety of difficulties encountered in workflow/preparation, emergency egress, coil sensitivity-anatomy mismatch, and the necessity to anesthetize the patient. A 32 channel thoracic coil system with application to the 0-7 year old patient population was developed from a prototype originally created by Shreyas Vasanwalla at Stanford/Lucinda Bell Childrens Hospital. A uniform array was found (both through simulation and experiment) to give the best SNR and g factor performance, offering a significantly improved scan time and patient experience relative to existing coil systems.