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Updated: Jan 21, 2026

Whole-body PET/MRI of Pediatric Patients: The Details That Matter
Published on: December 19, 2017
Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Head and Neck MRI RF Array Integrated with a 511 keV Transmission Source
Lucia Isabel Navarro de Lara1, Roberta Frass-Kriegl1, Andreas Renner1,2
1Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Medical University of Vienna, Waehringer Guertel 18-20, 1090 Vienna, Austria.
Abstract:
The goal of this work is to further improve positron emission tomography (PET) attenuation correction and magnetic resonance (MR) sensitivity for head and neck applications of PET/MR. A dedicated 24-channel receive-only array, fully-integrated with a hydraulic system to move a transmission source helically around the patient and radiofrequency (RF) coil array, is designed, implemented, and evaluated. The device enables the calculation of attenuation coefficients from PET measurements at 511 keV including the RF coil and the particular patient. The RF coil design is PET-optimized by minimizing photon attenuation from coil components and housing. The functionality of the presented device is successfully demonstrated by calculating the attenuation map of a water bottle based on PET transmission measurements; results are in excellent agreement with reference values. It is shown that the device itself has marginal influence on the static magnetic field B0 and the radiofrequency transmit field B1 of the 3T PET/MR system. Furthermore, the developed RF array is shown to outperform a standard commercial 16-channel head and neck coil in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and parallel imaging performance. In conclusion, the presented hardware enables accurate calculation of attenuation maps for PET/MR systems while improving the SNR of corresponding MR images in a single device without degrading the B0 and B1 homogeneity of the scanner.
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