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Reproducibility and reliability of short‐TE whole‐brain MR spectroscopic imaging of human brain at 3T
Author(s) -
Ding XiaoQi,
Maudsley Andrew A.,
Sabati Mohammad,
Sheriff Sulaiman,
Dellani Paulo R.,
Lanfermann Heinrich
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
magnetic resonance in medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.696
H-Index - 225
eISSN - 1522-2594
pISSN - 0740-3194
DOI - 10.1002/mrm.25208
Subject(s) - reproducibility , intraclass correlation , choline , nuclear medicine , creatine , voxel , metabolite , phosphocreatine , medicine , chemistry , nuclear magnetic resonance , radiology , chromatography , physics , energy metabolism
Purpose A feasibility study of an echo‐planar spectroscopic imaging (EPSI) using a short echo time (TE) that trades off sensitivity, compared with other short‐TE methods, to achieve whole brain coverage using inversion recovery and spatial oversampling to control lipid bleeding. Methods Twenty subjects were scanned to examine intersubject variance. One subject was scanned five times to examine intrasubject reproducibility. Data were analyzed to determine coefficients of variance (COV) and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) for N–acetylaspartate (NAA), total creatine (tCr), total choline (tCho), glutamine/glutamate (Glx), and myo‐inositol (mI). Regional metabolite concentrations were derived by using multi‐voxel analysis based on lobar‐level anatomic regions. Results For whole‐brain mean values, the intrasubject COVs were 14%, 15%, and 20% for NAA, tCr, and tCho, respectively, and 31% for Glx and mI. The intersubject COVs were up to 6% higher. For regional distributions, the intrasubject COVs were ≤ 5% for NAA, tCr, and tCho; ≤ 9% for Glx; and ≤15% for mI, with about 6% higher intersubject COVs. The ICCs of 5 metabolites were ≥ 0.7, indicating the reliability of the measurements. Conclusion The present EPSI method enables estimation of the whole‐brain metabolite distributions, including Glx and mI with small voxel size, and a reasonable scan time and reproducibility. Magn Reson Med 73:921–928, 2015. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.