Using Large Arrays for SNR Improvement on Receiver Limited MRI Systems

Large arrays of RF coils with 16 or more channels are becoming commercially available. However, most MR scanners have eight or fewer receiver channels. In order for these scanners to achieve the SNR benefits of these large arrays, the signals from the array elements must be combined. In this paper, strategies for combining the array elements into 8 or fewer channels are discussed and an analysis of the expected SNR improvement is presented. We expect these results to scale to cases such as 32 channels with 128 array elements.