32 Channel Coil Array for Parallel RF Transmission

Introduction: As part of a study that investigates a substantially distributed multi-channel parallel transmit approach, head-size 32-element transmit/receive arrays were developed. The specific goal of the coil development is to facilitate reduction of RF power dissipation in the imaged object / the coil structure, and to facilitate B1 shimming / accelerated parallel excitation for an arbitrarily oriented target slice or volume. In the following we describe the coil design and construction process, and present 3T imaging results that were obtained by driving in parallel the elements of one array with current-source RF power amplifiers.