Abstract #0220

Integrated AC/DC coil and dipole Tx array for 7T MRI of the spinal cord

Nibardo Lopez Rios¹, Ryan Topfer², Alexandru Foias², Axel Guittonneau^2,3, Kyle M. Gilbert⁴, Ravi S. Menon^4,5, Lawrence L. Wald^6,7,8, Jason P. Stockmann^6,7, and Julien Cohen-Adad^2,9

¹NeuroPoly Lab, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Polytechnique Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada, ²Electrical Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada, ³École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Lyon, France, ⁴Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada, ⁵Department of Medical Biophysics, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada, ⁶Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United States, ⁷Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, ⁸Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States, ⁹Functional Neuroimaging Unit, CRIUGM, University of Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada

Imaging the spinal cord is a never-ending challenge, especially when venturing to ultra-high fields. We propose a novel coil design for spinal cord 7T MRI, which combines state-of-the-art transmit and receive technologies. The transmit coil is a 3-dipole array, allowing homogeneous B₁ field with parallel excitation. The receive part consists of a 15-channel AC/DC coil that can achieve both high sensitivity and local B₀ shimming, including real-time shimming to compensate for respiratory-induced field variations. The design can achieve 32% reduction of static field inhomogeneities and 27% reduction in temporal field variance, opening the door to exciting EPI and spectroscopy applications.

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