MR Water/Fat Separation Improves Optical Breast Imaging

Colin Morehouse Carpenter¹, Shudong Jiang², Brian William Pogue², Keith David Paulsen²

IDEAL water/fat separation was used to improve hemoglobin quantification of MR-guided optical imaging. This technique is shown to reduce the cross-talk between oxyhemoglobin and water, caused by the spectral similarity of these tissue constituents in the near-infrared. It is demonstrated in gelatin phantoms that this approach reduces error in oxyhemoglobin by 70% on average for several cases. This finding has significant benefit for optical breast imaging, as the improved quantification provided by the MR water image can be leveraged to reduce the number of wavelengths in the optical data acquisition and thus increase temporal resolution.