MR mammography has shown stellar sensitivity in early disease detection, but its high rate of false positives makes it difficult for clinicians to decide which apparent lesions merit biopsy. To aid this decision, my lab is developing a method to yield new chemical information from the suspicious regions identified on MR mammography. More specifically we are modifying an iMQC method that can give detailed chemical information (highly resolved spectra) on the composition of fat in the suspicious region.
One challenge of acquiring this information is the long scan time of these experiments, which dovetails with my other research interest in highly efficient image reconstruction. These techniques help us reconstruct images and spectra with a minimum amount of data, leading to shorter MR scan times.