Kinetic analysis of benign and malignant breast lesions with ultrafast dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI: Comparison with standard kinetic assessment

Objective. The purposes of this study were to evaluate diagnostic parameters measured with ultrafast MRI acquisition and with standard acquisition and to compare diagnostic utility for differentiating benign from malignant lesions. MATERIALS AND METHODS. Ultrafast acquisition is a high-temporal-resolution (7 seconds) imaging technique for obtaining 3D whole-breast images. The dynamic contrast-enhanced 3-T MRI protocol consists of an unenhanced standard and an ultrafast acquisition that includes eight contrast-enhanced ultrafast images and four standard images. Retrospective assessment was performed for 60 patients with 33 malignant and 29 benign lesions. A computeraided detection system was used to obtain initial enhancement rate and signal enhancement ratio (SER) by means of identifcation of a voxel showing the highest signal intensity in the frst phase of standard imaging. From the same voxel, the enhancement rate at each time point of the ultrafast acquisition and the AUC of the kinetic curve from zero to each time point of ultrafast imaging were obtained. RESULTS. There was a statistically signifcant difference between benign and malignant lesions in enhancement rate and kinetic AUC for ultrafast imaging and also in initial enhancement rate and SER for standard imaging. ROC analysis showed no signifcant differences between enhancement rate in ultrafast imaging and SER or initial enhancement rate in standard imaging. CONCLUSION. Ultrafast imaging is useful for discriminating benign from malignant lesions. The differential utility of ultrafast imaging is comparable to that of standard kinetic assessment in a shorter study time.