Abstract
Purpose:To develop and demonstrate a short breast (sb) MRI protocol that acquires both T2‐weighted and dynamic contrast‐enhanced T1‐weighted images in approximately ten minutes.Methods:The sb‐MRI protocol consists of two novel pulse sequences. The first is a flexible fast spin‐echo triple‐echo Dixon (FTED) sequence for high‐resolution fat‐suppressed T2‐weighted imaging, and the second is a 3D fast dual‐echo spoiled gradient sequence (FLEX) for volumetric fat‐suppressed T1‐weighted imaging before and post contrast agent injection. The flexible FTED sequence replaces each single readout during every echo‐spacing period of FSE with three fast‐switching bipolar readouts to produce three raw images in a single acquisition. These three raw images are then post‐processed using a Dixon algorithm to generate separate water‐only and fat‐only images. The FLEX sequence acquires two echoes using dual‐echo readout after each RF excitation and the corresponding images are post‐processed using a similar Dixon algorithm to yield water‐only and fat‐only images. The sb‐MRI protocol was implemented on a 3T MRI scanner and used for patients who had undergone concurrent clinical MRI for breast cancer screening.Results:With the same scan parameters (eg, spatial coverage, field of view, spatial and temporal resolution) as the clinical protocol, the total scan‐time of the sb‐MRI protocol (including the localizer, bilateral T2‐weighted, and dynamic contrast‐enhanced T1‐weighted images) was 11 minutes. In comparison, the clinical breast MRI protocol took 43 minutes. Uniform fat suppression and high image quality were consistently achieved by sb‐MRI.Conclusion:We demonstrated a sb‐MRI protocol comprising both T2‐weighted and dynamic contrast‐enhanced T1‐weighted images can be performed in approximately ten minutes. The spatial and temporal resolution of the images easily satisfies the current breast MRI accreditation guidelines by the American College of Radiology. The protocol has the potential of making breast MRI more widely accessible to and more tolerable by the patients.JMA is the inventor of United States patents that are owned by the University of Texas Board of Regents and currently licensed to GE Healthcare and Siemens Gmbh.
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