William E. Wu1, Ivan Kirov1, Ke
Zhang1, James S. Babb1, Chan-Gyu Joo2,
Eva-Maria Ratai2, R. Gilberto Gonzalez2, Oded Gonen1
1Radiology, New York
University Medical Center, New York, NY, United States; 2Neuroradiology,
Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United States
Non-human primates are often used as preclinical model systems to study the effects of (mostly diffuse) neurological disorders and their experimental treatment. Due to cost considerations, such studies frequently utilize non-invasive, non-destructive imaging modalities, MRI and proton MR spectroscopy (1H-MRS). These costs may explain why the inter- and intra-animal reproducibility of 1H-MRS-observed brain metabolites, N-acetylaspartate, creatine, choline, and myo-inositol, are not reported. To this end, we performed test-retest three-dimensional 1H-MRS scans in five healthy rhesus macaque brains at 3 T. We demonstrate the advantage of the approach and its utility for cross-sectional and longitudinal preclinical studies of diffuse neurological diseases.