Echo-planar spectroscopic imaging (EPSI) of the water resonance structure in human breast using sensitivity encoding (SENSE).

High spectral and spatial resolution MRI, based on echo-planar spectroscopic imaging, has been applied successfully in diagnostic breast imaging, but acquisition times are long. One way of increasing acquisition speed is to apply the sensitivity encoding algorithm for complex high spectral and spatial resolution data. We demonstrate application of a complex sensitivity encoding algorithm to high spectral and spatial resolution MRI data, in a phantom and human breast, with 7- and 16-channel dedicated breast phased-array coils. Very low g factors are obtained using the breast coils, and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) penalty for water resonance peak height and water resonance asymmetry images is small at acceleration factors of up to 6 and 4, respectively, as evidenced by high Pearson correlation factors between fully sampled and accelerated data. This is the first application of the sensitivity encoding algorithm to characterize the structure of the water resonance at high spatial resolution. (c) 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.