Nuclear magnetic resonance and detection of human breast tumor.

Malignant, benign, and normal breast tissues corrected for fat appeared to have similar nuclear magnetic proton spin-lattice relaxation times, contrary to previously published reports. However, due to a lower fat content, benign and malignant tumors relaxed more slowly than the surrounding normal tissue. This provides a possibility for locating them (but not for discriminating between them) in a breast by the nuclear magnetic resonance imaging technique zeugmatography.