ECCENTRIC: A fast and unrestrained approach for high-resolution in vivo metabolic imaging at ultra-high field MR

Antoine Klauser; Bernhard Strasser; Wolfgang Bogner; Lukas Hingerl; Sebastien Courvoisier; Claudiu Schirda; Bruce R Rosen; Francois Lazeyras; Ovidiu C Andronesi

doi:10.1162/imag_a_00313

ECCENTRIC: A fast and unrestrained approach for high-resolution in vivo metabolic imaging at ultra-high field MR

Imaging Neurosci (Camb). 2024 Oct 14:2:1-20. doi: 10.1162/imag_a_00313. eCollection 2024 Oct 1.

Authors

Antoine Klauser^{1

2

3

4}, Bernhard Strasser^{1

5}, Wolfgang Bogner⁵, Lukas Hingerl⁵, Sebastien Courvoisier^{3

4}, Claudiu Schirda⁶, Bruce R Rosen¹, Francois Lazeyras^{3

4}, Ovidiu C Andronesi¹

Affiliations

¹ Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States.
² Advanced Clinical Imaging Technology, Siemens Healthcare AG, Lausanne, Switzerland.
³ Department of Radiology and Medical Informatics, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
⁴ CIBM Center for Biomedical Imaging, Geneva, Switzerland.
⁵ High-Field MR Center, Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-Guided Therapy, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
⁶ Department of Radiology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, United States.

Abstract

A novel method for fast and high-resolution metabolic imaging, called ECcentric Circle ENcoding TRajectorIes for Compressed sensing (ECCENTRIC), has been developed at 7 Tesla MRI. ECCENTRIC is a non-Cartesian spatial-spectral encoding method designed to accelerate magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) with high signal-to-noise at ultra-high field. The approach provides flexible and random sampling of the Fourier space without temporal interleaving to improve spatial response function and spectral quality. ECCENTRIC enables the implementation of spatial-spectral MRSI with reduced gradient amplitudes and slew-rates, thereby mitigating electrical, mechanical, and thermal stress of the scanner hardware. Moreover, it exhibits robustness against timing imperfections and eddy-current delay. Combined with a model-based low-rank reconstruction, this approach enables simultaneous imaging of up to 14 metabolites over the whole brain at 2-3 mm isotropic resolution in 4-10 min. MRSI ECCENTRIC was performed on four healthy volunteers, yielding high-resolution spatial mappings of neurochemical profiles within the human brain. This innovative tool introduces a novel approach to neuroscience, providing new insights into the exploration of brain activity and physiology.

Keywords: 3D magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging; compressed sensing; high resolution whole-brain metabolite imaging; low-rank; non-Cartesian; ultra-high field.