Comparison of three commercially available radio frequency coils for human brain imaging at 3 Tesla |
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Authors: | Ralf Mekle Wietske van der Zwaag Andreas Joosten Rolf Gruetter |
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Affiliation: | (1) Centre d’Imagerie BioMedicale (CIBM), Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), EPFL SB IPMC LIFMET, CH F0 572 (Batiment CH), Station 6, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland;(2) Laboratory for Functional and Metabolic Imaging (LIFMET), Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland;(3) Department of Radiology, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland;(4) Departments of Radiology, Universities of Lausanne and Geneva, Lausanne/Geneva, Switzerland |
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Abstract: | Objective To evaluate a transverse electromagnetic (TEM), a circularly polarized (CP) (birdcage), and a 12-channel phased array head
coil at the clinical field strength of B
0 = 3T in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), signal homogeneity, and maps of the effective flip angle α.
Materials and methods SNR measurements were performed on low flip angle gradient echo images. In addition, flip angle maps were generated for αnominal = 30° using the double angle method. These evaluation steps were performed on phantom and human brain data acquired with
each coil. Moreover, the signal intensity variation was computed for phantom data using five different regions of interest.
Results In terms of SNR, the TEM coil performs slightly better than the CP coil, but is second to the smaller 12-channel coil for
human data. As expected, both the TEM and the CP coils show superior image intensity homogeneity than the 12-channel coil,
and achieve larger mean effective flip angles than the combination of body and 12-channel coil with reduced radio frequency
power deposition.
Conclusion At 3T the benefits of TEM coil design over conventional lumped element(s) coil design start to emerge, though the phased array
coil retains an advantage with respect to SNR performance. |
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Keywords: | RF-coil TEM coil High field MRI SNR B 1 field |
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