Breast tissue differentiation using arterial spin tagging.

An arterial spin tagging (AST) pulse sequence has been developed to measure T(1) and relative blood perfusion. This full sequence is composed of three sequences: selective tagging, nonselective tagging, and nontagging. Perfusion quantification error resulting from imperfect inversion and acquisition slice profiles has been addressed in the literature. In this work, the error is reduced through the application of optimized Shinnar-Le Roux (SLR) RF pulses and a semi-log linear regression data-processing technique. A threshold approach based on the breast tissue T(1) and relative blood perfusion is introduced to show that these two parameters can be applied to breast tissue differentiation and potentially to cancer detection. Copyright 2003 Wiley-Liss, Inc.