Evaluation of Anatomical Guided Reconstruction for Improving the Spatial Resolution of Deuterium Metabolic Imaging

Motivation: The inherently low SNR of DMI hinders clinical viability at 3T. Goal(s): We evaluate an anatomically guided reconstruction (AGR) approach to enhance the spatial resolution of DMI scans via exploiting correlated anatomic information in corresponding 1H images. Approach: We used segmented MRI scans of patients with CNS tumors to simulate DMI metabolic maps and corresponding ground truth, which were then used to evaluate AGR performance with respect to both SNR and the targeted spatial resolution. Results: Findings demonstrated that this AGR approach is largely robust to noise and most successful at upsampling factors between 2-4, after which the reconstructions starts to fail. Impact: DMI can uncover novel metabolic information about CNS lesions. We demonstrate that mutual anatomic information from 1H MRI can bring 3T DMI closer to clinically-viable spatial resolutions. Further work is needed to assess its utility across lesion sizes and pathologies.