Improved Measures of Renal Pyruvate-To-Lactate Conversion Using Diffusion Gradients

Jeremy W. Gordon¹, David J. Niles¹, Kevin M. Johnson¹, Sean B. Fain¹

Imaging of hyperpolarized ¹³C is often hampered by partial-volume effects from the large pyruvate signal in the vasculature. Signal from these spins can lead to flow-related artifacts and partial-volume effects with organ voxels, interfering with modeling of kinetic parameters. To mitigate these effects, bipolar gradients were inserted into a spiral sequence to remove the signal contribution from vascular spins. An optimal b-value was experimentally chosen to null flowing spins while minimizing signal attenuation from static spins. Partial-volume and flow related artifacts are substantially reduced while the kinetics are substantially changed, due to the elimination of contaminating vascular signal.