Rosette Spectroscopic Imaging for Whole-Brain Slab Metabolite Mapping at 7T: Acceleration Potential and Reproducibility

Whole-brain proton magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (¹H-MRSI) is a non-invasive technique for assessing neurochemical distribution in the brain, offering valuable insights into brain functions and neural diseases. It greatly benefits from the improved SNR at ultrahigh field strengths (≥ 7T). However, ¹H-MRSI still faces several challenges, such as long acquisition time and severe signal contamination from water and lipids. In this study, 2D and 3D short TR/TE ¹H-FID-MRSI sequences using rosette trajectories were developed with nominal spatial resolutions of 4.48 × 4.48 mm² and 4.48 × 4.48 × 4.50 mm³, respectively. Water signals were suppressed using an optimized Five-variable-Angle-gaussian-pulses-with-ShorT-total-duration (FAST) water suppression scheme of 76 ms, and lipid signals were removed using the L₂ regularization method. Metabolic maps of major ¹H metabolites were obtained in 5:40 min with 16 averages and 1 average for the 2D and 3D acquisitions, respectively. Excellent intra-session reproducibility was shown, with the coefficients of variance (CV) being lower than 6% for N-Acetyl-L-aspartic acid (NAA), Glutamate (Glu), total Choline (tCho), Creatine and Phosphocreatine (tCr), and Glycine and Myo-inositol (Gly + Ins). To explore the potential of further acceleration, compressed sensing was applied retrospectively to the 3D datasets. The structural similarity index (SSIM) remained above 0.85 and 0.8 until R = 2 and 3 for the metabolite maps of Glu, NAA, tCr, and tCho, indicating the possibility for further reduction of acquisition time to around 2 min.