High-Resolution T1-Weighted Imaging of the Breast with a Flexible Dual-Echo Dixon Method

Holger Eggers¹, Marko K. Ivancevic², Gillian M. Newstead³, Gwenael Herigault⁴

Dixon methods have been shown to improve the homogeneity and the extent of fat suppression in breast imaging. However, the traditional choice of in- and out-of-phase echo times leads to restrictions on the achievable spatiotemporal resolution. In this work, a recently proposed dual-echo Dixon method with flexible echo times is employed to overcome these restrictions. It is demonstrated to permit bilateral breast imaging with sub-millimeter resolution in less than a minute at 3 T. While an accurate modeling of the fat signal is found to be crucial, a fixed seven-peak spectral model is shown to be sufficient for an excellent fat suppression.