title: Investigation of coil phase compensation in 3D imaging at very high acceleration factors.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To investigate the confounding effect of the coil phase in highly accelerated parallel imaging with small coils, contextualize the effect in terms of single-echo acquisition (SEA) imaging, and show that it can be managed in the case of 3D imaging.
  
  
  METHODS
  The effects of the coil phase variations in a 64-channel array of surface microcoils were modeled. Fully encoded 64 x 128 x 64 (N(phase enc) x N(readout) x N(slice enc)) 3D data sets were obtained, from which factor of 64 accelerated 3D image sets (1 x 128 x 64 each) were extracted from single phase-encoding lines, each representing a different phase compensation value.
  
  
  RESULTS
  A comparison of the SEA images indicates that the choice of a compromise value for phase compensation successfully enabled a straightforward extension of SEA imaging to three dimensions. The use of the single compromise compensation value in the 3D acquisition resulted in a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) penalty ranging from 6% to 41% through the slab when compared to the highest SNR possible using any phase compensation value.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The coil-related phase shift issues inherent to highly accelerated imaging will require further study, but this work indicates the general nature of the problem and, more auspiciously, shows that it can be mitigated for at least this application.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, Texas A&M University, 3120 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843, USA. mpmcdougall@tamu.edu
authors.forename: Mary Preston
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: McDougall
authors.forename: Steven M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Wright
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D004867:Equipment Design; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods; D019047:Phantoms, Imaging