Development of animal-dedicated phased-array coils for rat images

The researched aimed to achieve high-resolution images by manufacturing rat-dedicated 8-channel phased-array coils, with a receiver in every coil and with a small diameter. Recently, this has been the most widely used method in animal experiments. The manufactured rat-dedicated 8-channel phased-array coil is made of polyimide, a PC board material. The manufactured coil is an 8-channel, phased-array, receive-only coil. The coil has a diameter of 80 mm and a length of 150 mm. An overlap among channels is 8 mm. The average difference between the signal-to-noise ratios of a rat-dedicated 8-channel phased-array coil and a clinically-dedicated 1-channel loop coil was 748.93 ± 10.59, with the better SNR being observed in the rat-dedicated coil. This study verified that the manufactured phased-array coil was much better in terms of signal-to-noise ratio when the rat-dedicated 8-channel phased-array coils at 3.0-T was compared to a clinically-dedicated 1-channel loop coil. Moreover, further use of rat-dedicated coils in animal experiments to acquire various signals from organs other than just the brain is expected in the future.