A 13 channel 3 Tesla Shoulder Coil on a Domed Conformable Former

Introduction: MRI provides an essential tool for musculoskeletal radiology. The highest quality images are obtained with anatomically specific RF coil designs, customized to the anatomy of interest. The shoulder presents a difficult target, however, because of wide variations in body habitus and the difficulty of arranging coil elements around the shoulder to optimize sensitivity. The most commonly available shoulder coils consist of a rigid concave housing on which 4 to 8 receive elements are arranged. These provide high sensitivity in the rotator cuff region, but the sensitivity drops off steeply towards deeper tissue such as the glenoid cartilage and the labro-ligamentous anatomy. Flexible designs have also been described to accommodate different body sizes [1]. In this work, we design, build and test a novel shoulder array aiming to achieve higher SNR in deep tissue and improving parallel imaging performance in a flexible coil housing which can conform to a variety of body types.