During 2006-2007 progress was made primarily in the following areas. A 32-channel detector array was developed in collaboration with Nova Medical and was tested for brain imaging. The detector allows parallel imaging with 1D acceleration rates of 3-fold without significant noise amplification. This facilitates high resolution fMRI and MRI in clinically feasible scan times. This array has become our standard detector at 7T and has been extensively tested in normals and to a lesser extent in patients. In a second project, previously developed technology for real-time correction of respiration effects was further optimized. It was found that the use of dual bellows to characterize abdominal and chest motion simultaneously leads to a more robust correction and improved image quality. In a third project, head motion compensation was improved based on stereovision with 2 video cameras. The technique was evaluated in practice, suggesting that substantial improvement in image quality is possible. This technique is key to achieve high resolution MRI of the brain, in particular on patients. Finally, pulse sequence optimization was performed to improve contrastto-noise-ratio, pushing the image resolution to 220x220x500 micron in scan times of about 20 minutes.
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