1. A method of selecting a set of coil elements from a multitude of physical coil elements comprised in a coil array for performing a magnetic resonance imaging scan of a region of interest, the method comprising: determining a coil sensitivity matrix of the multitude of physical coil elements for the region of interest, determining a projection matrix, the projection matrix projecting the sensitivity matrix of the multitude of physical coil elements onto a set of virtual coil elements, determining from the projection matrix the contribution of each physical coil element of the multitude of physical coil elements to the set of virtual coil elements, selecting from the contribution the most significantly contributing physical coil elements as the set of coil elements.