Purpose: To optimize a reordered k-space acquisition that applies intermittent fat saturation (FS) pulses to allow for a time-efficient reduction of fat signal in breast MR images, and compare it with an elliptic-centric biphasic FS method in terms of the degree of fat suppression and speed.
Materials and methods: The behavior of the fat and water signals under the influence of the reordered sequence was characterized. This allowed us to optimize the flip angle and visualize the expected artifacts by deriving the point spread function (PSF) of the fat signal. We compared the two sequences by acquiring images with a varying number of FS pulses, with a corresponding difference in scan time. The quality of the images was assessed by comparison with images obtained with full fat suppression as measured by a root-mean-square (RMS) error metric.
Results: The reordered sequence allowed for an approximately twofold reduction in error compared to the biphasic sequence for the same scan time. With the reordered sequence and optimized scan parameters, we were able to reduce the time spent on fat suppression by as much as 99% with no discernible reduction in image quality.
Conclusion: This method will allow robust fat suppression with virtually no extension in imaging time for dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE)-MRI.
(c) 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc.