Cross-vendor transfer and RF coil comparison of a high-resolution MP2RAGE protocol for brain imaging at 7T

Abstract. An established MP2RAGE protocol for semi-quantitative structural brain MRI was transferred from one 7T MR scanner to that of another vendor featuring comparable hardware, but opposite polarity. On this system, the scan time could be reduced from 11 to 8 minutes by elliptical k-space sampling. Three configurations of radio-frequency (RF) transmission were compared (single channel with quadrature slitting, two and eight channels of fixed phase delays). Data processing for offline calculation MP2RAGE images is described in detail. The DICOM scaling of scanner B entails a loss of precision and accuracy and stronger artifacts in regions of low RF field, which can be improved by dielectric pads. For comparison and multi-site studies, though, use of an identical scan protocol and identical RF hardware is recommended. (Less)