The present invention is a dual resonant breast coil design for combined sodium and proton breast MRI with increased SNR at 3T when compared to a coil with a single proton and sodium channel. The coil consists of a 7-channel sodium receive phased array, a large sodium transmit coil, and a 4-channel hydrogen transceive array. An interleaved overlapping coil layout is used to reduce coupling between sodium and proton coil elements. The new composite array coil demonstrates a 2-5× improvement in SNR for sodium imaging when compared to a simple single-loop dual resonant design.
