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

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Abstract

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.

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Data availability statement

Data and code from this work are available at: Code: github.com/usc-mrel/speech_coil_eval, Data: zenodo.org/record/5898595.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge grant support from the National Science Foundation (#1828736) and research support from Siemens Healthineers.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Felix Muñoz & Krishna S. Nayak

  2. Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Yongwan Lim & Krishna S. Nayak

  3. Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Sophia X. Cui

  4. Stark Contrast, Erlangen, Germany

    Helmut Stark

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  1. Felix Muñoz
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Correspondence to Felix Muñoz.

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Dr. Sophia Cui is an employee of Siemens Healthcare.

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All procedures involving human subjects were in accordance with the local ethics board.

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Supplementary Information

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An example of real-time speech production imaging with the custom upper airway coil. The data were acquired while the subject was counting from 1 to 5 at normal and then speeded rates. Imaging was performed with a spiral-based balanced steady-state free precession pulse sequence with parameters: TR: 5.3 ms, flip angle: 35˚, FOV: 28cm2, slice thickness: 6 mm, in-plane spatial resolution: 2.3x2.3 mm2, and temporal resolution: 10.6 ms/frame. The image series was reconstructed using a sparse SENSE reconstruction with a temporal finite difference constraint (acceleration factor = 6.5) Supplementary file1 (MP4 8551 kb)

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Muñoz, F., Lim, Y., Cui, S.X. et al. Evaluation of a novel 8-channel RX coil for speech production MRI at 0.55 T. Magn Reson Mater Phy 36, 419–426 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10334-022-01036-0

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