Improved Lesion Conspicuity on Contrast Enhanced Breast MRI at 3 Tesla using Linear Vs. Radial-Centric K-Space Ordering

Bonnie N. Joe¹, Dorota Wisner¹, Vignesh A. Arasu¹, Sachiko Suzuki¹, Vibhas S. Deshpande², Belinda Chang¹, Gerhard Laub², Nola M. Hylton¹

We evaluated lesion conspicuity and level of detail on breast MR images of patients scanned with radial-centric and linear ordered k-space techniques on separate days. Breast imagers ranked linear ordering better than radial-centric for lesion conspicuity and level of image detail. Similarly, quantitative analyses showed increased peak signal enhancement ratio (SER) in 4/5 patients and increased SER total enhancing volume in 5/5 patients for linear versus radial-centric. More motion artifact was noted with linear ordering but overall image quality ranked similarly between linear and radial-centric. Radiologists should be aware of these tradeoffs when designing their breast MR cancer imaging protocol.