abstract.tex

MRI is an attractive tool for fetal imaging due to its unique ability to provide detailed anatomical and physiological
data in an inherently safe manner. In practice, the problem of unpredictable and nonrigid fetal motion limits fetal MRI
to fast single shot T2 weighted sequences such as HASTE, which have poor tissue contrast, low SNR, and cannot provide
detailed physiological information. In this work, we designed, built, and tested a semi-adjustable anatomically shaped
64 channel array coil for fetal imaging at 22 weeks of pregnancy. The coil's performance was compared to that of the
vendor's standard configuration consisting of an 18 channel flexible body array and ~16 channels from a 32 channel spine
array. The fetal coil provides roughly $5\%$ better SNR in the fetal brain region of an anthropomorphic phantom and
allows increasing SENSE acceleration factor from $R=4$ to $R=5$ in the right-left direction and $R=3$ to $R=4$ in the
head-foot direction.