Optimisation and Evaluation of Diffusion-Weighted Magnetic Resonance for Assessing Mobile Lipid Resoanances in Cancer

Dominik Zietkowski¹, Thomas R. Eykyn¹, Nandita M. deSouza¹, Geoffrey S. Payne¹

Measuring mobile lipid resonance changes in 1H NMR spectra of cell pellets and tissues are confounded by signals from low molecular weight metabolites which complicate peak assignment and quantification. A simple and effective approach is to use diffusion-weighted sequences (DW) to attenuate the low molecular weight metabolites based on their relatively high diffusion coefficients. We have optimised a stimulated echo sequence with bipolar gradients to obtain diffusion-weighted HR-MAS spectra of model lipid solutions, cell pellets and cervical tissue samples, in order to characterise and validate the nature of the observed lipid chains in cancer cells in vitro and ex vivo.