title: Breast and axillary tissue MR imaging: correlation of signal intensities and relaxation times with pathologic findings.
abstract: We tested a variety of inversion-recovery (IR) and spin-echo (SE) sequences by imaging the breast masses of 22 patients before surgery and 23 tissue specimens with magnetic resonance (MR) imaging at 0.6 T to determine the most effective pulse sequences to evaluate breast disease. An SE pulse sequence using a long repetition time (TR) of 1,600 msec and a long echo time (TE) of 90 msec was found to be the most sensitive in depicting carcinoma in the excised tissue specimens, with all of the carcinomas (n = 15) demonstrating irregular areas of higher signal intensity (SI) than that of the adjacent fat. However, only five of 11 breast carcinomas present in the preoperative patients produced a higher SI than that produced by fat on the same T2-weighted sequence. Five of the remaining six carcinomas in the preoperative patients appeared as localized distortions of fibroductular architecture on both T2-weighted SE and IR sequences. In axillary tissue specimens, both metastatic carcinoma and hyperplastic lymph nodes produced a high SI on T2-weighted SE sequences. However, metastatic carcinoma had a significantly longer T2 relaxation time than did hyperplastic lymph nodes.
mesh_terms: D000232:Adenofibroma / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000473:pathology; D001365:Axilla / Q000473:pathology*; D001941:Breast Diseases / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000473:pathology; D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000473:pathology; D002277:Carcinoma / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000473:pathology; D005260:Female; D005348:Fibrocystic Breast Disease / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000473:pathology; D006406:Hematoma / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000473:pathology; D006801:Humans; D009682:Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy