Achieving Consistent, Homogeneous, Dark Fat Suppression on Bilateral Breast MRI at 3.0 Tesla in the Clinical Setting

Bonnie N. Joe¹, Vibhas S. Deshpande², Dorota J. Wisner¹, Vignesh A. Arasu¹, Nola M. Hylton¹, Gerhard A. Laub²

Good fat suppression is a fundamental aspect of diagnostic quality breast MR for cancer screening. However, obtaining homogeneous, dark fat suppression for bilateral T1-weighted breast MR is particularly challenging at 3T due to higher B0 and B1 inhomogeneities compared with 1.5T. These fat suppression challenges present a significant limitation to widespread acceptance of clinical breast MR at 3T, often overshadowing the potential advantages afforded by the increased signal to noise at 3T. In this abstract we describe a technique to achieve consistent homogeneous, dark fat suppression for T1 breast MR imaging at 3T.