A Novel Three-Channel Endorectal Coil for Prostate Magnetic Resonance Imaging at 3T.

OBJECTIVE

The purpose of this work is to develop a 3-channel endorectal coil (ERC-3C) structure to obtain higher signal-to-noise (SNR) and better parallel imaging performance for prostate magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at 3T.

METHODS

The coil performance was validated by in vivo studies and the SNR, g-factor, and diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) were compared. A 2-channel endorectal coil (ERC-2C) with two orthogonal loops and a 12-channel external surface coil were employed for comparison.

RESULTS

Compared with the ERC-2C with a quadrature configuration and the external 12-channel coil array, the proposed ERC-3C improved SNR performance by 23.9% and 428.9%, respectively. The improved SNR enables the ERC-3C to produce spatial high-resolution images of 0.24 mm × 0.24 mm × 2 mm (0.1152 μL) in the prostate area within 9 minutes.

CONCLUSION

We developed an ERC-3C and validated its performance through in vivo MR imaging experiments.

SIGNIFICANCE: The results demonstrated the feasibility of an ERC with more than two channels and that a higher SNR can be achieved using the ERC-3C compared with an orthogonal ERC-2C of the same coverage.