High frame‐rate simultaneous bilateral breast DCE‐MRI

A simultaneous bilateral back‐projection method for 3D dynamic contrast‐enhanced (DCE)‐MRI of the breasts was developed and evaluated. Using a double‐side band modulation of the RF slab excitation pulse, discontinuous volumes that included both breasts were simultaneously selected. The number of slice phase‐encoding steps was undersampled by a factor of 2, and the resulting signal aliasing from one volume to the other was removed using SENSE processing. In‐plane encoding was performed with an interleaved radial acquisition reconstructed using dynamic k‐space‐weighted image contrast (KWIC) temporal filtering. Image resolution was 0.5 × 0.5 × 3.0 mm3 with an effective temporal resolution of 15 s for both breast volumes. Combined with the 2× acceleration from SENSE encoding, this is a 16× acceleration factor over a conventional MR bilateral breast scan. An initial evaluation of these methods was performed on a cohort of women who presented with palpable or mammographically visible breast abnormalities. A total of 73 abnormalities were found in 45 of the 54 bilateral examinations that were performed. In 11 of these cases there was a significant finding in the contralateral breast. DCE images of both breasts can be acquired simultaneously, resulting in high‐resolution images as well as rapid sampling of the contrast kinetics. Magn Reson Med 57:220–225, 2007. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.