Table 1.

Technical parameters for the 3 tesla (T) and 1.5T imaging protocols utilized in this study. Note that the 3T protocol achieves 41% greater in plane spatial resolution than the 1.5T protocol in a similar overall scan time.

Parameter	3 tesla	1.5 tesla
Plane	Axial	Axial
Breast coil type	16 channel	8 channel
Mode	3D	3D
Sequence type	Fast gradient echo	Fast gradient echo
Fat Suppression	SPAIR	SPIR
Parallel Imaging Factor	2.7 R/L, 2.0 S/I	1.5 R/L
TR (msec)	5.9	5.6
TE (msec)	3	3
Flip angle (degrees)	10	10
Field of View (cm2)	22 A/P × 33 R/L	36 A/P × 36 R/L
Matrix	440 × 660	420 × 420
In-plane voxel size (mm)	0.5	0.85
Slice thickness (mm)	1.3 → 0.65 recon	1.6
Scan time (min)	2:51	2:53

Abbreviations: SPAIR = Spectral Attenuated Inversion Recovery, SPIR = Spectral Presaturation with Inversion Recovery, R = right, L = left, A = anterior, P= posterior, recon = reconstructed