Evaluation of a vendor-agnostic scan-specific quality control acquisition for clinical whole-body MRI (WB-MRI) protocols

A short quality control (QC) acquisition and analysis process was developed previously to detect faulty RF coil elements and coil positioning errors in whole-body (WB) MRI. This work demonstrates the feasibility of this process on systems from three manufacturers and reports on the evaluation of this approach following its addition to the clinical WB-MRI protocol for all examinations over a period of six months on six scanners, providing on-going monitoring of image quality across 450 examinations. Two previously unidentified broken RF coil elements were detected, which were affecting clinical image quality, demonstrating the value of this active detection approach.