Phase alignment of multiple surface coil data for reduced bandwidth and reconstruction requirements

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
• Biophysics

Background:

• Clinical MRI utilizes multiple surface coils to enhance signal-to-noise ratio (S/N).
• Standard multicoil methods necessitate increased sampling bandwidth and complex data processing for each coil element.
• These requirements pose technical challenges for high-speed MRI applications.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a phase-alignment technique for simplifying multicoil MRI signal processing.
• To reduce the technical demands associated with conventional multicoil MRI.
• To enable high-speed MRI techniques with relaxed hardware and software constraints.

Main Methods:

• A novel phase-alignment technique is described, integrating signals from multiple coil elements prior to image reconstruction.
• Both hardware and software implementations of the technique were developed.
• The method was tested using phantoms and human volunteers to demonstrate its applicability.

Main Results:

• The phase-alignment technique significantly simplifies reconstruction, reducing requirements to those of a single coil.
• Hardware implementation further allows a substantial decrease in net sampling bandwidth.
• Successful application in high-speed MRI was demonstrated in phantom and volunteer studies.

Conclusions:

• The described phase-alignment method offers a more efficient approach to multicoil MRI.
• It relaxes technical requirements, making high-speed MRI more feasible.
• This technique has the potential to improve clinical MRI workflows and capabilities.