Luca Nagel1, Geoffrey J. Topping1, and Franz Schilling1
1Department of Nuclear Medicine, Technical University of Munich, School of Medicine, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Munich, Germany
1Department of Nuclear Medicine, Technical University of Munich, School of Medicine, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Munich, Germany
We show that a cryogenically cooled 13C RF coil
can improve the SNR up to a factor of 10 compared to conventional RF coils. As a proof of concept, we
used the 13C-cryocoil for improved
detection of hyperpolarized compounds in vivo.
Figure 1: CSI images of the
thermal 13C Urea phantom (a, cryocoil), (b, surface coil) and (c,
volume coil). It can be seen that both surface coils suffer from an inhomogeneous
transmit and receive profile. (d), (e) and (f) show spectra from the voxel
indicated by the black box in the above images. The spectral range indicated
by the arrows was used for the calculation of noise distribution. (g), (h) and
(i) show the the Rician noise distribution from the range indicated in the
above spectra.
Figure 2: The peak intensity
maps for the cryocoil (a) and surface coil (b) at RF powers that yield similar
excitation profiles for both coils(c). (d) and (e) show an example of the noise
maps, which were determined by fitting a Rician distribution to the noise
region shown in Fig.1. The SNR ratio along the lines in (a) and (b) is shown in
(f). (g) and (h) show the calculated SNR maps of the cryocoil and the surface coil. In (i), the ratio of the two SNR maps is shown.
