The clinical use of echoplanar MR tomography in the detection of focal liver lesions. The results of a quantitative study

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the clinical application of echoplanar MR imaging compared to conventional MR imaging in the detection of focal liver lesions. A total of three conventional and 12 echoplanar pulse sequences were acquired in 35 patients with focal liver lesions. Motion artifacts were eliminated because of short acquisition times of 32 ms subsequently improving signal-to-noise. A single-shot spin-echo technique with a TE of 26 ms provided the highest liver signal-to-noise ratio (p < 0.05) of all sequences acquired. Contrast-to-noise ratios for a single-shot SE technique with echo times of 50-100 ms were as high as 10-40.