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In vivo 23Na-MRI benefits greatly from SNR improvements at ultrahigh fields and with multi-channel receivers. Here, we report a pipeline for multi-echo radial imaging of 23Na (MERINA) at 7T, using a 32-channel receiver coil. This involves correction of image artifacts induced by gradient imperfections, followed by channel combination to maintain Rician noise distributions in combined magnitude images. This led to improved T2* mapping with a fixed-component bi-exponential signal model. T2* values (e.g. T2s*=4.6±0.9ms, T2l*=28.3±2.8ms in cerebral white matter) agree with reports in literature. Future work will involve correcting B0 inhomogeneity effects, more sophisticated signal models and exploring potential clinical applications.
Rot et al. (Wed,) studied this question.