Description: MR spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) is a powerful tool to non-invasively map brain metabolites in animals and humans, with one drawback the long measurement times.
Several methods have been proposed to accelerate 1H MRSI UHF for clinical applications (i.e. FID-MRSI and spatial-spectral encoding), with in plane spatial resolutions of 1.7-10 mm and the detection of several metabolites.
High resolution 1H MRSI preclinical data quantitatively mapping an extended number of metabolites are still acquired using traditional phase encode MRSI, as pioneered by our group, while 31P MRSI in preclinical models is non-existent.
MRSI is highly challenging due to metabolites low concentration, long measurement times, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), hardware limitations (B0 and gradients strength, RF coils, B0 inhomogeneities), advanced pulse sequences and processing that need to be developed in-house, quality assessment of a huge number of spectra, and precision and reliability of derived metabolite maps.
The main goal is therefore to develop fast and highly spatially resolved MRSI of the whole rodent brain combined with an automatic processing pipeline for phase/frequency corrections and automatic quality control.
Investigator: Cristina Cudalbu (EPFL)
Collaborator: Wolfgang Bogner (Medical University of Vienna, Austria)