Densely-Populated Transceiver Surface Coil Array for the Human Brain Studies at 7 T.

Nikolai I. Avdievich¹, Jullie W. Pan¹, Hoby P. Hetherington¹

Transceiver surface coil arrays improve transmit performance and B1 homogeneity for head imaging up to 9.4T. Arrays with larger number of smaller elements further improve SNR and parallel imaging. Overlapping adjacent elements optimizes both the loading and the penetration depth, but complicates the decoupling. First, the adjacent coils generate substantial mutual resistance and cannot be decoupled using common methods, which compensate only for the mutual reactance. Second, in a densely-populated overlapped array, coupling exists between non-adjacent elements. We have developed a single-row (1x16) overlapped surface coil transceiver head array with decoupling of both the adjacent and the next-to-one neighboring elements.