Ka-Loh Li1, Yiping Du2, Evelyn Proctor1, Xiaoping Zhu1, Milica Medved3, Gregory Karczmar3, Nola Hylton1
1Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA; 2Brain Imaging Center, University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine, Aurora, CO, USA; 3Radiology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
We propose a new approach to incorporate ASL with a breast EPSI (BEPSI) to evaluate perfusion in the spectrally segmented water and other tissues. The results show substantial improvement in restoring perfusion contrast between cancer and normal tissues. The spectrally segmented water images showed increasing blood flow in cancer focus. Fat images showed spread of neovasculature. The spatial distribution of enhancement of tumor rim/center different on ASL-BEPSI and CE-MRI provides additional information. In summary, the new method provides a new means to assess perfusion of breast cancers, The EPSI approach is probably the way to do breast ASL imaging.