A Unilateral Rf Coil for MR-Scintimammography

Seunghoon Ha¹, Mark Jason Hamamura¹, Werner W. Roeck¹, Orhan Nalcioglu¹

Synopsis: Many studies have indicated that preoperative MRI is useful in local staging for surgical planning, especially for patients with lobular cancer. However, the low specificity of MRI, despite its high sensitivity, may lead to many unnecessary biopsies or over-treatment. Scintimammography (SMM) can be a tool to supplement MRI for improving the diagnostic specificity in breast cancer imaging. In this study, a unilateral breast array coil and CZT detector module specialized for MR-SMM is introduced. The variation of RF coil performance due to assembly with a CZT detector module is discussed with results from simulation and experiment.