Breast MRI
Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths among American women after lung cancer according to the Center for Disease Control. Currently the most common breast cancer screening method is X-ray mammography; however, several studies have shown that MRI has much higher sensitivity for detecting cancer, especially in high-risk women. Our breast MRI research includes imaging at higher spatial resolution to better depict tumor features as well as enabling different image contrast mechanisms to help to classify malignancy and tumor sub-types.
Most commonly, breast cancers are shown in MRI by injecting a contrast agent. Because of the increased and "leaky" blood supply to the tumor, the tumor becomes brighter than the other tissue soon after injection. Advanced methods are necessary to image quickly enough to resolve the brightness changes with high image resolution.
Other MRI methods to assess breast cancer include T2-weighted imaging and diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI). We are exploring faster and sharper techniques to acquire these images. While T2 and DWI are currently not as accurate for cancer detection, they do not require injection of a contrast agent, so may offer cheaper and wider access to MRI for many patients.
Our research was featured in NIBIB's Health and Education: A Sharper View for Breast MRI: June 29, 2011
Relevant Publications
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Diffusion-Weighted DESS with a 3D Cones Trajectory for Non-Contrast-Enhanced Breast MRI
In this work a novel diffusion-weighted method, DW-DESS-Cones, is developed and characterized in vivo for the MRI of breast cancer without a contrast injection.
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Multi-Shot DWI of the Breast with MUSE and shot-LLR Reconstructions
This manuscript presents a clinical breast MRI study that investigates the performance of single-shot DWI and multi-shot DWI reconstructed by two different techniques (MUSE and Shot-LLR).
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Accelerated Multi-Shot DWI Reconstruction Using an Unrolled Network with U-Net as Priors
In this work, we accelerate and improve the reconstruction of multi-shot diffusion-weighted MRI by an unrolled pipeline, in which the presumed regularization term is replaced by a U-Net.
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A Mixed-Reality System for Breast Surgical Planning
We have developed a mixed-reality system that projects a 3D “hologram” of images from a preoperative breast MRI onto a patient using the Microsoft HoloLens.
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Fat-Based Registration of Breast Dynamic Contrast Enhanced Water Images
Dynamic contrast-enhanced breast MRI scans take 5-10 minutes to acquire, so motion between the temporal phases is a common problem that must be corrected before post-processing.
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MRI with Compressed Sensing and Variable View Sharing
A new sampling pattern enables retrospective selection of frame rates in MRI to allow for different spatiotemporal resoluiton tradeoffs and protocol optimization for different imaging applications.
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Multiband Diffusion-Weighted Breast MRI
This novel technique reduces distortion in high-resolution diffusion MRI.
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High-Resolution, 3D Diffusion-Weighted Breast MRI with DESS
High-resolution diffusion-weighted breast MRI allows for detection of small lesions and can distinguish between benign and malignant lesions.
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Rapid 3D MRI of Breast Perfusion
Breast cancer is most often detected on MRI using contrast-enhanced imaging.
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Custom-Fitted 16-Channel Bilateral Breast Coil
MR receive coils with a higher number of channels generate images with higher signal-to-noise ratio and allow for accelerated imaging.
