United States Department of Veterans Affairs
United States Department of Veterans Affairs

Center for Imaging of Neurodegenerative Diseases

Development of whole-brain echo-planar spectroscopic imaging at 4 Tesla

Scientist
Andreas Ebel, Ph.D.

Abstract

The goal of this project is the development of a high-speed, high-spatial-resolution 3D echo-planar spectroscopic imaging (EPSI) pulse sequence for whole-brain spectroscopic imaging of human brain in vivo at 4 T. In previous work, a high-spatial-resolution 3D EPSI pulse sequence was developed for use at lower field strengths (1.5 T and 3 T). Our current work is focused on implementing this methodology at higher field strength and to accelerate the acquisition in order to facilitate integration into comprehensive clinical MRI/MRS protocols. Improvements in acquisition speed will be based on parallel imaging approaches (in collaboration with Dr. Xiaoping Zhu), “blipped” phase-encoding, and optimized efficiency of k-space sampling (in collaboration with Dr. Karl Young), all of which are currently ongoing research projects. Data reconstruction and analysis is ultimately going to be integrated into the MIDAS (Metabolite Imaging and Data Analysis System) software package. Applications of whole-brain EPSI in our lab are in epilepsy, Gulf War illness, and traumatic brain injury.


References

  • A. Ebel, B.J. Soher, and A.A. Maudsley, “Assessment of 3D proton MR echo-planar spectroscopic imaging using automated spectral analysis”, Magn. Reson. Med. 46, 1072-1078, 2001.
  • A. Ebel and A.A. Maudsley, “Improved spectral quality for 3D MR spectroscopic imaging using a high spatial resolution acquisition strategy”, Magn. Reson. Imaging, 21, 113-120, 2003.
  • A. Ebel, A.A. Maudsley, M.W. Weiner, and N. Schuff, “Achieving sufficient spectral bandwidth for volumetric 1H echo-planar spectroscopic imaging at 4 Tesla”, Magn. Reson. Med. 54:697-701, 2005.
  • A. Ebel, M.W. Weiner, and N. Schuff, “Factor-2 acceleration for 3D EPSI at 4T using modified blipped phase-encoding”, Proc. ISMRM 14th Scientific Meeting and Exhibition, Seattle, WA, 2006, p. 3071.
  • X. Zhu, A. Ebel, J.X. Ji, M.W. Weiner, and N. Schuff, “Sensitivity Encoded Three Dimensional Echo Planar Spectroscopic Imaging (3D-EPSI) of Human Brain at 4T“, Proc. ISMRM 14th Scientific Meeting and Exhibition, Seattle, WA, 2006, p. 3075.
  • A.A. Maudsley, A. Darkazanli, J.R. Alger, L.O. Hall, N. Schuff, C. Studholme, Y. Yu, A. Ebel, A. Frew, D. Goldgof, Y. Gu, R. Pagare, F. Rousseau, K. Sivasankaran, B.J. Soher, P. Weber, K. Young, and X. Zhu, “Comprehensive processing, display, and analysis for in vivo MR spectroscopic imaging”, NMR in Biomedicine, 19:492-503, 2006.