MR Imaging the spinal cord of non-human primates (NHP), such as squirrel monkey, is important since the injuries in NHP resemble those that afflict human spinal cords. Our previous studies have reported a multi-parametric MRI protocol, including functional MRI, diffusion tensor imaging, quantitative magnetization transfer and chemical exchange saturation transfer, which allows non-invasive detection and monitoring of injury-associated structural, functional and molecular changes over time. High signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is critical for obtaining high-resolution images and robust estimates of MRI parameters. In this work, we describe our construction and use of a single channel coil designed to maximize the SNR for imaging the squirrel monkey cervical spinal cord in a 21 cm bore magnet at 9.4 T. We first numerically optimized the coil dimension of a single loop coil and then evaluated the benefits of a quadrature design. We then built an optimized coil based on the simulation results and compared its SNR performance with a non-optimized single coil in both phantoms and in vivo.

中文翻译：

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松鼠猴脊髓成像的发射/接收表面线圈的优化。

对非人类灵长类动物（NHP）的脊髓（例如松鼠猴）进行MR成像非常重要，因为NHP中的损伤类似于折磨人类脊髓的损伤。我们以前的研究已经报道了多参数MRI协议，包括功能MRI，扩散张量成像，定量磁化传递和化学交换饱和传递，该技术可以无创地检测和监测与损伤相关的结构，功能和分子随时间的变化。高信噪比（SNR）对于获得高分辨率图像和MRI参数的可靠估计至关重要。在这项工作中，我们描述了单通道线圈的构造和使用，该单通道线圈旨在最大程度地提高SNR，以在9.4 T的21 cm孔磁体中对松鼠猴颈脊髓成像。我们首先在数值上优化了单环线圈的线圈尺寸，然后评估了正交设计的好处。然后，我们基于仿真结果构建了优化线圈，并将其SNR性能与幻像和体内非优化单线圈进行了比较。