Approaching ultimate SNR and ideal current patterns with finite surface coil arrays on a dielectric cylinder

In parallel imaging techniques, the number of elements in the receive coil array, as well as their geometrical arrangement, is fundamental for achieving many-fold accelerations. As the number of channels available in MR systems has increased to enable faster acquisitions, building prototypes of coil arrays has become more difficult and expensive, and therefore the design of coil arrays has relied ever more upon electrodynamic simulations. Calculations of the ultimate intrinsic signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) have indicated that there is an intrinsic limit to the acceleration capabilities of parallel imaging [1,2]. Recent work has shown that knowledge of thi