2023-06-27 MRRC Educational Summary: Head Coil Selection

Hello MRRC Users,

The MRRC regularly receives questions about which head coil we recommend for new brain imaging studies. Dr. Chan Moon, Technical Director of the center, compared the performance of two of our main coils, the 32-channel head coil and the 64-channel head/neck coil. Attached to this message is a very detailed technical report for those who want to dig into the details of our general recommendation below (see comparison_of_32ch_64ch.pdf).

To summarize, the coils are very close in performance with the 64-channel coil performing slightly better at high acceleration factors. The MRRC recommends most new studies select the 64-channel coil, especially if you plan to use a combination of high in-plane acceleration (e.g., GRAPPA) and/or SMS multiband (MB) acceleration (this practice is very common among our users). One important caveat to our recommendation is that the 32-channel coil is better shaped for scanning small heads such as those of young children (see 64ch_coil_setup.pdf for more details).

Whenever you design a new MR study, please feel free to reach out to our team to discuss the nuances of all equipment and parameter selection. We hope to provide additional educational content like this message to our users. If you have ideas for future educational content, please forward them to me at aer126@pitt.edu.

Best,
Andrew Reineberg
and on behalf of Dr. Chan Moon