Simple Approach for Increasing SNR, Reducing Breast Shading and Improving Fat Suppression at 3T

Ileana Hancu¹, Laura Sacolick², Seung-Kyun Lee¹, W Thomas Dixon¹, Randy Giaquinto¹, Graeme McKinnon³, Vijayanand Alagappan⁴

The main cause of the shading and improper fat suppression artifacts in breast imaging at 3T was identified as a bimodal distribution of the excitation field. A correction approach, based on the permanent placement of a passive loop tuned to 150MHz over the (always weaker) right side of a standard 8 channel breast receive array, was shown to mitigate the problem, result in more uniform B1transmit, better fat suppression and higher SNR, all with lower specific absorption rate.