The advancement of clinical applications of 7T MRI depends heavily on the development of new RF coil designs. Recent works based on Ultimate Intrinsic SNR theory demonstrated that an optimal central SNR at 7T requires combining surface loops with dipole antennas. In this work, we developed and evaluated two novel 32-element 7T human head loop/dipole array designs. Both coils demonstrated superior Tx-efficiency, longitudinal coverage, and SNR in comparison to widely used commercial array coil. While the transceiver (TxRx)-dipole/receive(Rx)-loop array demonstrated best SNR, the TxRx-loop/Rx-dipole array showed the best Tx-efficiency. In addition, double-row TxRx-loop/Rx-dipole array provides 3D RF shimming capability.
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