PHASE ALIGNMENT OF MULTIPLE SURFACE COIL DATA FOR REDUCED BANDWIDTH AND RECONSTRUCTION REQUIREMENTS

Multiple element surface coils are often used in clinical MRI to incre ase the image signal-to-noise ratio (S/N). Use of multi-coils typicall y requires increased net sampling bandwidth and data processing for ea ch coil element, A phase-alignment technique is described which combin es the signals from all coil elements before image reconstruction, gre atly relaxing the technical requirements of the standard multicoil met hods. Hardware and software implementations allow reduction of the rec onstruction requirement to that of a single coil. The hardware impleme ntation additionally allows a significant reduction in the net samplin g bandwidth. The method is applicable to high speed MRI techniques, as demonstrated in phantoms and volunteers.