Rapid MRI acquisition and reconstruction techniques to improve breast cancer detection ; Techniques d'acquisitions et reconstructions IRM rapides pour améliorer la détection du cancer du sein

Breast cancer is nowadays the first cause of female cancer and the first cause of female death by cancer. Breast MRI is only performed in second intention when other imaging modalities cannot lead to a confident diagnosis. In high risk women population, breast MRI is recommended as an annual screening tool because of its higher sensitivity to detect breast cancer. Breast MRI needs contrast agent injection to visualize enhancing lesions and the diagnosis is mostly based on morphological analysis of these lesions. Therefore, an acquisition with high spatial resolution is needed. Despite the use of conventional MRI acceleration techniques, the volume of data to be acquired remains quite large and the temporal resolution of the exam is around one minute. This low temporal resolution may be the cause of the low specificity of breast MRI exam. Breast MRI with higher temporal resolution will allow the use of pharmacokinetic models to access physiological parameters and lesion specifications. The main aim of this work is to develop a MRI sequence allowing a flexible use of the acquired data at the reconstruction stage. On the one hand, the images can be reconstructed with a conventional reconstruction like the protocol used in clinical routine. On the other hand, the new MRI sequence will also allow the reconstruction of images with a higher temporal resolution allowing the use of pharmacokinetic models. The development of this sequence was done by modifying the acquisition order in the Fourier domain. A random acquisition of the Fourier domain will allow the reconstruction of sub-sampled domains acquired faster. We paid attention to fat suppression efficiency with this new Fourier domain acquisition order. Tests were performed on phantom, female volunteers and patients. These tests showed that the random acquisition did not impact the quality of images (MRI signal and lesion morphology) obtained by conventional reconstruction thus allowing the conventional diagnosis. The reconstructions of the sub-sampled Fourier ...