A novel whole-head RF coil design tailored for concurrent multichannel brain stimulation and imaging at 3T

•We designed and constructed a 28-channel whole-brain RF coil to be integrated with a multichannel 3-axis TMS coil array.•Interactions between TMS-MRI analyzed indicate that the effect observed can likely be explained by eddy currents induced on the TMS units by the MR signal, which appear as losses and shielding effects in the receive circuit.•The SNR performance comparison in vivo with the 32/20-channel commercial coils showed that our TMSMR 28-channel presents about 66%-86% SNR compared to the 32/20-channel head coil respectively.•Our TMSMR 28-channel coil achieved similar parallel imaging capabilities as the 32-channel head coil.•The presented TMSMR 28-channel integrated with a multichannel 3-axisTMS coil system will be a novel tool capable of causal mapping of human brain function.