Transmit/Receive Surface Coil for Functional

Purpose: To design and evaluate a four-channel cardiac transceiver coil array for functional cardiac imaging at 7T. Materials and Methods: A four-element cardiac trans-ceiver surface coil array was developed with two rectangu-lar loops mounted on an anterior former and two rectan-gular loops on a posterior former. specific absorption rate (SAR) simulations were performed and a Bþ1 calibration method was applied prior to obtain 2D FLASH CINE (mSENSE, R 2) images from nine healthy volunteers with a spatial resolution of up to 1 1 2.5 mm3. Results: Tuning and matching was found to be better than 10 dB for all subjects. The decoupling (S21) was measured to be>18 dB between neighboring loops,>20 dB for opposite loops, and>30 dB for other loop combi-nations. SAR values were well within the limits provide