32 channel Visual Cortex Phased-Array MR coil for the Siemens 3T TIM Trio

The Güdform 32 channel MR coil is atlas-optimised for visual cortex imaging and provides 7T-like performance on standard 3T scanners. In many locations, SNR of this posterior-only coil is more than 2X greater than a typical vendor-provided whole-head 32 channel coil, and allows for fast, high-resolution imaging of the visual cortex, down to 0.75mm isotropic voxel resolution for fMRI, and 0.35mm isotropic resolution for anatomical imaging.

Performance

The data below was obtained using a Siemens 3T TIM Trio. It is typical performance of the coil for measuring cortical activity during visual perception.

The example data was collected with a periodic stimulus: 30s of movie viewing followed by 30s of blank. The top row shows three slices of a single raw acquisition. The image is not smoothed and was acquired with a single-shot gradient echo EPI sequence — it did not use segmented EPI (multi-shot), multi-slice or multi-band. The middle 4x4 plot is the time course plot of the voxels at and around the cursor point of the fMRI overlay in the bottom row. The the centre 4 plots correspond to the 4 voxels at and immediately around the cursor; the plots at the edges of the 4x4 matrix correspond to the voxels neighbouring those at the cursor.

Important point: very little pre-processing went into this example — the images are not smoothed, and the plots show essentially the raw response from a single voxel.

0.75 x 0.75 x 0.75mm resolution. Single-shot gradient echo EPI, TE=31

1 x 1 x 1mm resolution. Single-shot gradient echo EPI, TE=30