A Comparison Between Shielded and Unshielded RF Antennas for 7T Body MRI

To more fully realize the benefit of UHF MRI, coil designs must be optimized to for pTx and intrinsic SNR performance. In this abstract we compare 5 RF coil array block systems. The first comparison ran is pTx performance, the second comparison is of intrinsic array SNR, and the third tests robustness to top loading. The shielded and unshielded three-loop dipole elements performed better than the single-loop dipole and the shieled helped with top load insensitivity. From these results we conclude that the three-loop dipole coil blocks have superior performance and that the shield doesn’t hurt performance.