MRI of hyperpolarized 13C-labeled compounds is an emerging tool to non-invasively detect metabolic processes, and hyperpolarized [1-13C]pyruvate has been used in clinics for assessing cancer and cardiac metabolism. However, due to nonrenewable and progressively depleted magnetization, hyperpolarized 13C has a limitation to achieve both high spatial resolution and temporal resolution with high SNR. This study proposes a novel bicarbonate-specific 3D bSSFP sequence with stack-of-spiral readout to improve the SNR of dynamic bicarbonate imaging in hyperpolarized [1-13C]pyruvate studies. Compared to a metabolite-specific GRE sequence, the proposed MS-3DbSSFP sequence showed a 3X SNR improvement for bicarbonate imaging in rat heart and kidneys.
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