Holger Eggers1, Marko K. Ivancevic2, Gillian M. Newstead3, Gwenael Herigault4
1Philips Research, Hamburg, Germany; 2Philips Healthcare, Cleveland, OH, United States; 3University of Chicago Medical Center, Chicago, IL, United States; 4Philips Healthcare, Best, Netherlands
Dixon methods have been shown to improve the homogeneity and the extent of fat suppression in breast imaging. However, the traditional choice of in- and out-of-phase echo times leads to restrictions on the achievable spatiotemporal resolution. In this work, a recently proposed dual-echo Dixon method with flexible echo times is employed to overcome these restrictions. It is demonstrated to permit bilateral breast imaging with sub-millimeter resolution in less than a minute at 3 T. While an accurate modeling of the fat signal is found to be crucial, a fixed seven-peak spectral model is shown to be sufficient for an excellent fat suppression.