Custom integration of a magnetic-field monitoring system into a 32-channel MRI head coil.

Purpose: Customizing a Siemens 32-channel coil for use in a Philips 3T MRI system with incorporated magnetic field probes for collecting high-quality MRI and magnetic-field monitoring data concurrently.

Methods: The development process of the custom coil involved several (iterative) phases. Standard temporal SNR and B data were collected with the 32-channel Siemens and for reference the 32-channel/8-channel Philips head coils before and after the custom coil was made compatible with the 3T Philips Achieva system, and magnetic field probes were installed into it along with ancillary electronics around it. Quality assurance tests were conducted in each of the build phases to ensure that the modifications did not affect MRI or field-monitoring data negatively. To test the finished custom coil, we collected high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) datasets on a spherical silicon oil phantom both with and without concurrent field monitoring and a 32-channel Philips coil without concurrent field monitoring, where the latter two served as reference scans to assess the improved performance of the custom coil with field monitoring. Similar HARDI-MRI data were also collected in vivo with the finished custom coil together with field monitoring data.

Results: The custom coil provided excellent temporal SNR especially at the edges where cortical gray matter is expected. When using concurrent field monitoring in HARDI acquisitions, the custom coil alleviated ghosting artifacts in phantom data and provided in vivo images with 1.4-mm isotropic resolution.

Conclusion: The custom MRI coil with integrated magnetic-field monitoring probes provided improved imaging performance.