Multiple-mouse MRI (MMMRI) accelerates biomedical research by imaging multiple mice simultaneously. To date, MMMRI has been explored in three ways: shielded transmit-receive coils, shielded transmits coil with separate unshielded receive coils; and finally shielded transmit-receive coils with independent gradient coils. However alternative transmit coil configurations and possible benefits of eliminating shielding have not yet been explored. The goal of this thesis is to test possible radiofrequency configurations with and without shielding for the purpose of improving image quality for MMMRI. Results demonstrate that using an unshielded transmit-receive coil array provided a 20% improvement over an identical shielded coil. A new unshielded 7-coil MMMRI array is presented, minimizing the ghosting between image overlap using mutual inductance minimization and a sensitivity encoding (SENSE) reconstruction. The final array provided high resolution images (90µm) of up to seven live mice simultaneously with appropriate signal-to-noise for automated analysis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/42700 |
| Date | 21 November 2013 |
| Creators | Carias, Marc |
| Contributors | Nieman, Brian |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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