Niranjan Venugopal1,2, Boyd McCurdy2,3, Salem Al Mehairi4, Abdulaziz Alamri4, Gurdarshan Singh Sandhu4, Darrel Drachenberg4, Lawrence Ryner1,2
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.