Custom-fitted 16-channel bilateral breast coil for bidirectional parallel imaging

A 16-channel receive-only, closely fitted array coil is described and tested in vivo for bilateral breast imaging at 3 T. The primary purpose of this coil is to provide high signal-to-noise ratio and parallel imaging acceleration in two directions for breast MRI. Circular coil elements (7.5-cm diameter) were placed on a closed "cup-shaped" platform, and nearest neighbor coils were decoupled through geometric overlap. Comparisons were made between the 16-channel custom coil and a commercially available 8-channel coil. SENSitivity Encoding (SENSE) parallel imaging noise amplification (g-factor) was evaluated in phantom scans. In healthy volunteers, we compared signal-to-noise ratio, parallel imaging in one and two directions, Autocalibrating Reconstruction for Cartesian sampling (ARC) g-factor, and high spatial resolution imaging. When compared with a commercially available 8-channel coil, the 16-channel custom coil shows 3.6× higher mean signal-to-noise ratio in the breast and higher quality accelerated images. In patients, the 16-channel custom coil has facilitated high-quality, high-resolution images with bidirectional acceleration of R = 6.3.