Albert P. Chen1, Ralph E. Hurd2,
Charles H. Cunningham3,4
1GE Healthcare, Toronto, ON, Canada; 2GE
Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, United States; 3Imaging Research, Sunnybrook
Health Sciences Centre, Toronto, ON, Canada; 4Medical Biophysics,
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
Metabolic
imaging using pre-polarized substrates labeled with a 13C nucleus has proven
to be a promising new tool. Often,
chemical-shift imaging (CSI) acquisitions are used to map the 13C resonances
over 2D or 3D volumes so that 13C metabolic data from various tissues can be
compared. Due to the time constraints
imposed by the relatively short lifetime of the hyperpolarized state, the
spatial dimensions of these acquisitions are often encoded with small matrix
sizes (e.g. 8 x 8 x 16), resulting in a relatively poor point-spread function
(PSF). In this abstract, we have
explored the use of non-Fourier spatial encoding to improve the PSF in both
in-plane dimensions of hyperpolarized 13C CSI acquisitions. Phantom
experiments showed an improved point-spread function and a rat study showed
the feasibility of using the method for in vivo data acquisition.