On SNR Performance of Sequence Designs for Dynamic Imaging of Hyperpolarized 13C Compounds

Kilian Weiss¹, Andreas Sigfridsson¹, Sebastian Kozerke¹

Hyperpolarized metabolically active substances provide a promising approach to investigating in vivo metabolism in real time. However, due to the transient life time of hyperpolarization and fast metabolic conversion of injected substances such as ¹³C labeled pyruvate, suitable fast dynamic spectroscopic imaging sequences. Several methods have been proposed for efficient spatiotemporal encoding for dynamic imaging of hyperpolarized compounds. The current work presents a theoretical framework based on a compartmental signal model and three frequently used pulse sequence designs for ¹³C labeled pyruvate are compared in terms of signal-to-noise ratio performance.Spatial and spectral selective excitations are found to be most optimal for signal-to-noise performance. Data acceleration techniques were found to be beneficial for signal-to-nose performance if data acquisitions are limited by technical constraints.