Receive Coils & Combined Shim-RF Arrays
Hui Han1
1Cedars Sinai Medical Center, United States

Synopsis

Keywords: Physics & Engineering: Hardware, Physics & Engineering: High-Field MRI, Body: Body

In this lecture, we'll explore the use of receive coils, including newly developed combined shim-RF arrays (1-7), for high-field imaging. Traditional volume RF coils are replaced by phased array coils, which use local RF surface coils on the human body for improved sensitivity and faster imaging. But B0 field inhomogeneity remains a major challenge for many high-field MRI applications. We'll discuss the concept of combined shim-RF arrays, which integrate a shim array into a receive coil to address this issue and improve image quality.

Overview

Although MRI has undergone significant hardware improvements over the years, such as multichannel RF detection (8) and transmission (9, 10), and increased magnetic field strengths (11, 12), B0 field inhomogeneity remains a major obstacle for many high-field MRI applications (13, 14). In particular, B0 inhomogeneity due to susceptibility variation across human organs and structures increases with the increasing main field strength. This issue can be addressed through hardware-based B0 shimming (1, 15-25), but standard spherical harmonic-based shim coils (26, 27) are usually limited in their ability to perform high-order shimming of the human organ of interest due to their distant location inside the magnet bore.

The lecture will discuss the concept of combined shim-RF arrays (1-7, 28), which aim to address this issue by integrating shim arrays into receive arrays. The combined shim-RF coils reduce the shim coil-organ distance by several times compared to traditional shim setup and thus provide new avenues for achieving very high order B0 shimming that was previously difficult to achieve. The lecture will provide an overview of the RF receive array (29-45), followed by a discussion of the current status and prospects of combined shim-RF arrays. Attendees will gain valuable insights into how these new technologies can be applied in various ways and will be given examples of their potential clinical applications.

Acknowledgements

No acknowledgement found.

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Proc. Intl. Soc. Mag. Reson. Med. 31 (2023)