Image quality and diagnostic performance of silicone-specific breast MRI

Abstract Purpose To compare the image quality of three techniques and diagnostic performance in detecting implant rupture. Materials and Methods The study included 161 implants for the evaluation of image quality, composed of water-saturated short TI inversion recovery (herein called “water-sat STIR”), three-point Dixon techniques (herein called “Dixon”), and short TI inversion recovery fast spin-echo with iterative decomposition of silicone and water using least-squares approximation (herein called “STIR IDEAL”) and included 41 implants for the evaluation of diagnostic performance in detecting rupture, composed of water-sat STIR and STIR IDEAL. Six image quality categories were evaluated and three classifications were used: normal implant, possible rupture, and definite rupture. Results Statistically significant differences were noted for the image quality categories (p  The sensitivity and specificity in detecting implant rupture of STIR-IDEAL were 81.8 % and 77.8 % and the difference between two techniques was not statistically significant. Conclusion STIR-IDEAL is a useful silicone-specific imaging technique demonstrating more robust water suppression and equivalent diagnostic accuracy for detecting implant rupture, than water-sat STIR, at the cost of longer scan time and an increase in minor motion artifacts.