Effect of contrast dose on diagnostic performance in DCE-MR breast imaging.

Objective: To assess the diagnostic performance of breast magnetic resonance (MR) imaging as a function of gadolinium contrast dose using a retrospective reader study.

Material And Methods: IRB approval was obtained prior to the start of this study and was HIPAA compliant. One-hundred and fifty MR breast examinations were included that were acquired between January 2001 and December 2006.

Deformation analysis of 3D tagged cardiac images using an optical flow method.

Background: This study proposes and validates a method of measuring 3D strain in myocardium using a 3D Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (CMR) tissue-tagging sequence and a 3D optical flow method (OFM).

Methods: Initially, a 3D tag MR sequence was developed and the parameters of the sequence and 3D OFM were optimized using phantom images with simulated deformation. This method then was validated in-vivo and utilized to quantify normal sheep left ventricular functions.

High frame-rate simultaneous bilateral breast DCE-MRI.

A simultaneous bilateral back-projection method for 3D dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE)-MRI of the breasts was developed and evaluated. Using a double-side band modulation of the RF slab excitation pulse, discontinuous volumes that included both breasts were simultaneously selected. The number of slice phase-encoding steps was undersampled by a factor of 2, and the resulting signal aliasing from one volume to the other was removed using SENSE processing.