An eight‐channel, nonoverlapping phased array coil with capacitive decoupling for parallel MRI at 3 T

An eight-channel, nonoverlapping phased array coil was designed for conventional and parallel imaging of the brain and the hip at 3T. The nonoverlapping design was selected on the basis of reduced parallel reconstruction noise inflation, as predicted by the diminution of g-factor hotspots in SENSE reconstruction simulations, and the higher peripheral signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) expected from smaller coil elements. A capacitive bridging technique, modeled by a circuit simulation, reduced the crosstalk between nearest neighbors to a manageable level. The capacitive decoupling technique was effective enough to allow the coil to be operated using standard system preamplifiers. The coil was shown to be useful for several conventional and parallel imaging applications. SNR improvements over a commercial eight-channel head coil were demonstrated in important structures in EPI-SENSE diffusion-weighted imaging. High-resolution MRSI (0.22 cc) yielded SNR of up to 21 for the NAA peak in the cortical gray matter. The coil also provided excellent fourfold accelerated GRAPPA images of the hip. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Concepts Magn Reson Part B (Magn Reson Engineering) 31B: 37–43, 2007