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Image quality comparisons of novel and commercial coil setups in MRI for head and neck radiotherapy simulation
Evangelia Kaza1, Jeffrey P Guenette2, Christian V Guthier1, Steven Hatch3, Alexander Marques3, Lisa Singer1, and Jonathan D Schoenfeld1
1Radiation Oncology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, 2Division of Neuroradiology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, 3Radiation Oncology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA, United States
A new UltraFlexLarge18 setup was more spacious and yielded higher SNR relative to a diagnostic head/neck coil than a commercially recommended FlexLarge4 coil setup for head images acquired in treatment position. Its clinical application could benefit head/neck radiotherapy MR simulations.
Figure 1. a) A healthy volunteer in a radiotherapy immobilization mask fixed on a Qfix Portrait board placed on a modified Qfix Insight board. Two UFL18 coils attached by Velcro straps over and under the Insight board encompassed the volunteer’s head. b) The same volunteer and immobilization with the head surrounded by two attached FL4 coils placed in a Qfix Insight holder. c) The same volunteer in standard head/neck diagnostic position using a dedicated HN20 coil, where treatment masks do not fit.
Figure 3. Graphs (top) and boxplots (bottom) of ratios of image quality parameters obtained using the flexible coil arrangements relative to the parameters obtained using a diagnostic HN20 coil, over all subjects and imaging sequences. From left to right: ratio of SNR, artifact size (AS) and CNR from the UFL18 (blue) and FL4 (red) coil images over SNR, AS and CNR from the HN20 coil images. ***: statistically significant difference (p < 0.001) between SNR_UFL18/SNR_HN20 and SNR_FL4/SNR_HN20.