title: Highly accelerated acquisition and homogeneous image reconstruction with rotating RF coil array at 7T-A phantom based study.
abstract: Parallel imaging (PI) is widely used for imaging acceleration by means of coil spatial sensitivities associated with phased array coils (PACs). By employing a time-division multiplexing technique, a single-channel rotating radiofrequency coil (RRFC) provides an alternative method to reduce scan time. Strategically combining these two concepts could provide enhanced acceleration and efficiency. In this work, the imaging acceleration ability and homogeneous image reconstruction strategy of 4-element rotating radiofrequency coil array (RRFCA) was numerically investigated and experimental validated at 7T with a homogeneous phantom. Each coil of RRFCA was capable of acquiring a large number of sensitivity profiles, leading to a better acceleration performance illustrated by the improved geometry-maps that have lower maximum values and more uniform distributions compared to 4- and 8-element stationary arrays. A reconstruction algorithm, rotating SENSitivity Encoding (rotating SENSE), was proposed to provide image reconstruction. Additionally, by optimally choosing the angular sampling positions and transmit profiles under the rotating scheme, phantom images could be faithfully reconstructed. The results indicate that, the proposed technique is able to provide homogeneous reconstructions with overall higher and more uniform signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) distributions at high reduction factors. It is hoped that, by employing the high imaging acceleration and homogeneous imaging reconstruction ability of RRFCA, the proposed method will facilitate human imaging for ultra high field MRI.
authors.affiliation: School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia.
authors.forename: Mingyan
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Beijing MRI Centre for Brain Research, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Zhentao
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zuo
authors.affiliation: School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia.
authors.forename: Jin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Jin
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Beijing MRI Centre for Brain Research, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Rong
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Xue
authors.affiliation: School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia.
authors.forename: Adnan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Trakic
authors.affiliation: School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia.
authors.forename: Ewald
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Weber
authors.affiliation: School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia.
authors.forename: Feng
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia. Electronic address: stuart@itee.uq.edu.au.
authors.forename: Stuart
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Crozier
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D004574:Electromagnetic Fields; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D019047:Phantoms, Imaging; D011846:Radio Waves; D059629:Signal-To-Noise Ratio
keywords: 7 Tesla; Homogeneous image reconstruction; Method of Moments (MoM); Parallel imaging; Phantom experiment; Phased array coils; Rotating RF coil (RRFC); Rotating RF coil array (RRFCA); SENSitivity Encoding (SENSE); SNR