Substantially Improved Receive Sensitivity of Human Whole-Brain MRI at 7T using a High-Permittivity Material (HPM) Slurry-Filled Helmet

Novel methods such as high-permittivity materials (HPM) and metasurfaces have improved RF coil transmission efficiency and receive field (B1-) sensitivity for MRI applications at ultrahigh field. One of the recent studies, which applied ceramic HPM helmet with the permittivity of 100, showed significant improvement in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Motivated from the previous studies with various forms of HPM at 3T and 7T, this study introduces an easy and accessible method with an HPM slurry helmet to largely improve imaging quality of human brain MRI at 7T, which could improve B1- field by 57% and SNR by 47%.