This disclosure provides a coil array for parallel magnetic resonance imaging data acquisition, comprising: a plurality of coil elements, wherein each of the coil elements is formed by a loop of wire, wherein the plurality of coil elements are arranged such that the coil elements are covering the imaged sample and uniformly distributed over a plane comprising the encoding directions not in parallel with the frequency encoding directions, which are the directions of the static magnetic field variation generated by a plurality of gradient coils of a magnetic resonance imaging system during magnetic resonance data sampling.