An Optimized “QD-like” 6-Channel Flexible and Ergonomic Shoulder Array Coil at 1.5T

Shoulder anatomy size varies significantly when human weight changes from 120lb to more than 400 lb. This rather a huge “shoulder geometry” variation presents a technical challenge to shoulder coil design with respect to coverage and SNR, yielding a conventional approach where a large shoulder coil and a small shoulder coil are offered. Previous studies show that hinged surface coil gave a higher SNR than armpit loop shoulder coil for a large population [1]. We herein report a novel shoulder coil which covers a very broad range patient population and still provides high SNR, uniformity, and depth coverage. This goal can be realized though the optimized ergonomics fitting between coil and shoulder anatomy which maximizes the MRI signal, bigger coil elements which allow good signal coverage in depth, and quadrature configuration which provides improved SNR and uniformity. With these considerations we propose an ergonomically-designed shoulder coil with 3 rows of loop and saddle pairs whose sizes are large enough to cover the practically and realistically largest shoulder size. Methods