Using Large Arrays for SNR Improvement on Receiver Limited MRI Systems

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
• Radiofrequency Engineering

Background:

• Commercial availability of large radiofrequency (RF) coil arrays (≥16 channels) is increasing.
• Most existing Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners are limited to eight or fewer receiver channels.
• Utilizing large RF coil arrays on limited-channel systems necessitates effective signal combination strategies to leverage their benefits.

Purpose of the Study:

• To discuss strategies for combining signals from large RF coil arrays into a reduced number of channels (≤8).
• To analyze the expected signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvements achievable with these combination strategies.
• To project the scalability of these findings to even larger systems, such as 32-channel systems with 128 array elements.

Main Methods:

• Review and discussion of various signal combination strategies for RF coil elements.
• Quantitative analysis of expected signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvements.
• Extrapolation of results to assess performance on different system configurations.

Main Results:

• Identified and discussed effective strategies for combining RF coil array elements.
• Presented an analysis of the anticipated SNR gains when using these methods.
• Demonstrated the potential for these strategies to scale to larger array and channel configurations.

Conclusions:

• Signal combination techniques are crucial for realizing the SNR advantages of large RF coil arrays on current MRI hardware.
• The analyzed strategies are expected to provide significant SNR improvements.
• The findings are applicable to a range of system sizes, including future high-channel count configurations.