Pushing Old Boundaries in Breast MRI: Non-Fatsaturated Dynamic Imaging at Very Short TE

Christian Geppert¹, Rolf Janka², Berthold Kiefer¹, Michael Uder², Evelyn Wenkel²

In non-fatsuppressed dynamic breast imaging, it is a well accepted recommendation to acquire data at or close to echo times that fulfil the in-phase condition for fat and water, such as 4.7ms at 1.5T, in order to avoid partial volume effects that lead to signal cancellation at fat/water interfaces. Thus it is usually suggested of using either in-phase TE or TE less than 1.2ms resulting in a phase difference of below 90. In a comparable parameter setting this would result in a decrease of 50% of the total acquisition time. With current gradient systems and fast imaging sequences this has now become possible without compromising the matrix size or the bandwidth. In this work we have set up an interleaved protocol approach to achieve a direct comparison of a minimum TE acquisition with a clinical standard protocol.