Objective: To compare conventional diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) with spectral spatial excitation (cDWI) and an enhanced DWI with additional adiabatic spectral inversion recovery (eDWI) for 3-T breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Methods: Twenty-four patients were enrolled in the study with both cDWI and eDWI. Three breast radiologists scored cDWI and eDWI images of each patient for fat-suppression quality, geometric distortion, visibility of normal structure and biopsy-proven lesions, and overall image quality. Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) for evaluable tissues were measured. Statistical tests were performed for qualitative and quantitative comparisons.
Results: Diffusion-weighted imaging with spectral spatial excitation yielded significantly higher CNR and SNR on a lesion basis, and higher glandular CNR and SNR and muscle SNR on a patient basis. Enhanced DWI also yielded significantly higher qualitative scores in all categories. No significant difference was found in ADC values.
Conclusions: Enhanced DWI provided superior image quality and higher CNR and SNR on a lesion basis. Enhanced DWI can replace cDWI for 3-T breast DWI.