Sensitivity of Hyperpolarized 13C Kinetic Modeling to Flip Angle and Number of Temporal Samples

Matthew Smith¹, Jeremy Gordon¹, Dave Niles¹, Kevin Johnson¹, Sean Fain¹, ²

Dynamic imaging of hyperpolarized ¹³C with MRI provides metabolic kinetics with spatial localization in-vivo but is challenging because both T₁ and RF decay reduce the hyperpolarized signal throughout the experiment. A low flip angle is typically used to mitigate RF decay and enable acquisition of many images by sacrificing image SNR. The simulations presented in this study investigate the kinetic modeling accuracy for a variety of flip angles and number of acquired images using a centric Cartesian trajectory and provides a target SNR for dynamic images.