Rapid fat suppression in MRI of the breast with short binomial pulses

PURPOSE: To develop a faster method of fat suppression for use in dynamic contrast enhanced MRI of the breast. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A method of fast fat suppression is presented using spatially nonselective rapid binomial pulses. In contrast to conventional binomial frequency-selective pulses, these short pulses are applied without interpulse delay, allowing for very rapid spectrally selective excitation. RESULTS: Effective water excitation and fat suppression were achieved in breast MRI at 3.0 Tesla with total excitation time as low as 160 microsec, which is several times shorter than the excitation time of currently used fat suppression techniques. Rapid fat suppression comes at the expense of increased specific absorption rate (SAR) and mildly degraded quality of suppression. A flexible tradeoff of short imaging time vs. SAR can be made to optimize imaging speed for fat-suppressed breast MRI. CONCLUSION: Rapid binomial pulses can be used for dynamic contrast enhanced breast MRI with excitation times significantly shorter than currently used fat suppression pulses. Shorter excitation time allows more rapid imaging, allowing greater temporal and spatial resolution for characterization of breast lesions.