Rapid Method for Chemical Shift Saturation Recovery (CSSR) Acquisition with 129Xe MR

Motivation: Hyperpolarized 129Xe Chemical Shift Saturation Recovery (CSSR), commonly employed for assessing pulmonary physiological function, is time-consuming and prone to weak signals and potential errors at short exchange times. Goal(s): To accelerate the acquisition of CSSR while ensuring the precise physiological parameter extraction. Approach: Techniques of inversion recovery (IR) and look-locker (LL) were combined with conventional CSSR (refer to as IR-LL-CSSR), and the results were compared with that obtained by conventional CSSR and IR-CSSR. Results: By using the proposed method (IR-LL-CSSR), the acquisition could be accelerated for eight times, and meanwhile preserve the accuracy of the extracted physiological parameters. Impact: IR-LL-CSSR substantially accelerates CSSR acquisition with 129Xe MRS and also ensures a precise physiological parameter assessment, showing promise for improving the pulmonary assessment in clinic.