Comparison of three multichannel TX/RX coils for anatomic and functional CMR at 7.0T

Background Ultrahigh field cardiac MR (CMR) is an area of vigorous ongoing research and is regarded as one of the most challenging MRI applications since image quality is not always exclusively defined by signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). The progress in the field has been driven by pioneering explorations into hardware developments which focused on novel multichannel transmit and receive coil arrays technology to tackle the challenges of B1-field inhomogeneities. Consequently, transmit-receive (TX/RX) structures are not a nicety but a necessity for ultrahigh field CMR including a trend towards a large number of transmit and receive channels. For all these reasons, this study was designed to compare the quality of anatomical and functional CMR at 7.0 T under clinical aspects using cardiac optimized transceive coils that use loop structures with the number of TX/RX elements ranging from 4-16. Methods