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 x 0.5 x 3.0 mm(3) with an effective temporal resolution of 15 s for both breast volumes. Combined with the 2x acceleration from SENSE encoding, this is a 16x 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.