High-resolution deuterium metabolic imaging of the human brain at 9.4 T using bSSFP spectral-spatial acquisitions

We demonstrated the feasibility of using bSSFP acquisitions for off-resonance insensitive high-resolution [6,6'-2H2]-glucose deuterium metabolic imaging (DMI) studies in the healthy human brain at 9.4T. Balanced SSFP acquisitions have potential to improve the sensitivity of DMI despite the SNR loss of phase-cycling and other human scanner constraints.We investigated two variants of bSSFP acquisitions, namely uniform-weighted multi echo and acquisition-weighted CSI to improve the SNR of deuterium metabolic imaging (DMI) in the brain with oral labelled-glucose intake. Phase-cycling was introduced to make bSSFP acquisitions less sensitive to B0 inhomogeneity. Two SNR optimal methods for obtaining metabolite amplitudes from the phase-cycled data were proposed. The SNR performance of the two bSSFP variants was compared with a standard gradient-spoiled CSI acquisition and subsequent IDEAL processing. In addition, in vivo T1 and T2 of water, glucose and Glx (glutamate+glutamine) were estimated from non-localized inversion recovery and spin-echo measurements.High-resolution whole-brain dynamic quantitative DMI maps were successfully obtained for all three acquisitions. Phase-cycling improved the quality of bSSFP metabolite estimation and provided additional spectral encoding. The SNR improvement was only observed for the CSI variant of bSSFP acquisitions with an average increase of 18% and 27% for glucose and Glx, respectively, compared to the vendor's CSI. ME-bSSFP acquisition achieved higher resolutions than acquisition-weighted CSI and exhibited several qualitative improvements.