Title

Hack your RF coil

Short description and the goals for the OHBM BrainHack

There are more than 100 7T scanners installed around the world and virtually all of them are equipped with an 32ch RF coils from Nova Medical. In the last decade, this coil model has evolved from a niche engineering challenge for prototype scanners to a mainstream FDA-approved medical product. Despite the current abundance of this coil, there are no public quality metrics about it's stability, consistency across sites, nor across models of single channel transmit (sTx) and multi-channel transmit (pTx).

However, these QA metrics are vital for the upcoming transition of most 7T scanners. Namely, until now almost all 7T scanners were used as single-channel transit systems (e.g. SIEMENS Magentom 7T, classic and Terra). But the new generation of FDA-approved 7T scanners that are solely used as parallel transmit systems (e.g. SIEMENS Terra.X). While the common pTx Nova coil has been successfully validated for a number of clinical imaging protocols, it has never been compared with the sTX coil for highly accelerated fMRI protocols.

Pilot experiments suggest that the pTx coil performs worse in tSNR limited fMRI protocols. This is despite the fact that the transmit performance is improved.

The goals of this project is to:

We cant to learn and describe basic QA procedures of 7T RF-coils.
We want to characterize the differences of noise characteristics in fMRI protocols across different coil models; pTx and sTx.
We want to engage with the community to gather and compare basic QA metrics across scanners.

We hope that these results will be informative as reference data for any 7T sights that are unsure if their SNR is at the optimal level. Furthermore, we hope that findings of this project will pave the way for cross-site large neuroimaging studies

Link to the Project

https://layerfmri.com/2024brainhack/

Image/Logo for the OHBM brainhack website

https://layerfmri.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/screen-shot-2024-06-11-at-14.18.09.png

Project lead

Github: layerfmri Discord: renzohuber

Main Hub

Hybrid (Americas)

Link to the Project pitch

https://youtu.be/F6DvXUi6cis

Other hubs covered by the leaders

[ ] Seoul
[ ] Hybrid (Asia / Pacific)
[ ] Hybrid (Europe / Middle East / Africa)
[x] Hybrid (Americas)

Skills

Attendees need to have access to a 7T scanner and need to be certified to operate it.

Good first issues

Good first issue: execute basic Coil QA

On all SIEMENS scanners, there is a standardized protocol that conveniently generates the most basic quality metric of any receive coil: coil_utils.

It can be found in the Dot-Cockpit under: default, Sequence region, Service Sequences, Default, coil_util.

Protocol PDF and improtable exar1 files for VE12U are available here: https://github.com/layerfMRI/Sequence_Github/tree/master/Coil_util_examples.

Example results of this first issue are shown here: https://layerfmri.com/2024brainhack/

Twitter summary

Hack your 7T RF-coil This project looks under the hood of 7T RF-coils. How stable are they acorss sites and across single-channel and multi-channel models? @layerfmri

ohbm / hackathon2024

Hack your RF coil #13