Evaluation of a novel 8-channel RX coil for speech production MRI at 0.55 T

Objective: Speech production MRI benefits from lower magnetic fields due to reduced off-resonance effects at air-tissue interfaces and from the use of dedicated receiver coils due to higher SNR and parallel imaging capability. Here we present a custom designed upper airway coil for ¹H imaging at 0.55 Tesla and evaluate its performance in comparison with a vendor-provided prototype 16-channel head/neck coil.

Materials and methods: Four adult volunteers were scanned with both custom speech and prototype head-neck coils. We evaluated SNR gains of each of the coils over eleven upper airway volumes-of-interest measured relative to the integrated body coil. We evaluated parallel imaging performance of both coils by computing g-factors for SENSE reconstruction of uniform and variable density Cartesian sampling schemes with R = 2, 3, and 4.

Results: The dedicated coil shows approximately 3.5-fold SNR efficiency compared to the head-neck coil. For R = 2 and 3, both uniform and variable density samplings have g-factor values below 1.1 in the upper airway region. For R = 4, g-factor values are higher for both trajectories.

Discussion: The dedicated coil configuration allows for a significant SNR gain over the head-neck coil in the articulators. This, along with favorable g values, makes the coil useful in speech production MRI.