Send and Receive – what is the potential?

The concept of using multiple receive coils [1] was primarily introduced to enhance the signal-to-noise-ratio and to shorten the acquisition times. This „parallel imaging“ concept is used for scan acceleration [2,3], optimal coil-signal combination and image uniformity improvement [1]. The number of receive channels has increased over the years, and commercial systems nowadays offer up to 32 channels and maybe even more in the future. One important application area is fMRI, but also whole body imaging is gaining increasing interest. Even though surface coil design has matured, coil arrays for parallel imaging, i…