A Voxel-By-Voxel Benchmark Comparison Between Two in Vivo Prostate MRSI Techniques

¹National Research Council Institute for Biodiagnostics, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; ²Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; ³Department of Medical Physics, CancerCare Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba; ⁴Department of Surgery (Section of Urology), University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

The effective suppression of periprostatic lipid signal to reduce contamination artifacts is vital to obtaining good spectroscopic data from in vivo prostate MRSI. We compare the commercially available PRESS based 3D MRSI technique to our modified PRESS 3D MRSI technique. Our modified sequence includes the first application of conformal voxel magnetic resonance spectroscopy (CV-MRS) optimization to in vivo prostate MRSI. This method conforms the excitation voxel to the shape of the prostate, effectively nulling signal from periprostatic lipids. A voxel-by-voxel benchmark test reveals that ~40% more spectra of are acceptable quality using the CV-MRS technique, and that in general the quality of the spectra throughout the prostate is improved.