Q&A with Russell Lagore and Kâmil Uğurbil

In this week’s interview, we discuss the latest paper by Kamil Ugurbil and Russel Lagore from the University of Minnesota, focused on a 64-channel receive array coil that improves acceleration and SNR at 7 Tesla.

09:19 Backgrounds: Russel started working in MRI during his master's studies at the University of Alberta, and is now an RF engineer. Kamil also started working in MRI during his graduate studies and is now the director of the CCMR (Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, Department of Radiology) at the University of Minnesota.

11:41 Asked about the background story behind the paper, Russel and Kamil wanted to push for high resolution in fMRI and were aware of several limitations that needed to be overcome to achieve it.

14:14 The authors talk about a marriage made in heaven between high field MRI and receive array coils.

16:44 Kamil expands on the potential implication of this new 64-channel coil for the Human Connectome Project (HCP).

20:17 Russel highlights the importance of the cable path and circuitry to reduce the interaction between the transmitter and the receiver coil. He also gives a brief overview about their prospective work to add more channels to their coil design at 10.5T.