Cell-Specific Mapping of MR Spectroscopic Signatures: A Pilot Study in a Murine Glioma Model

Motivation: Effective monitoring of tumor progression and therapeutic efficacy should benefit from new in vivo imaging capability to resolve cell-specific contributions at tissue level. Goal(s): To develop a new MRSI-based approach to resolve tumor cell-specific components at individual imaging voxels leveraging the spectral dimensions. Approach: We proposed a multiscale experimental and computational MRSI framework that learns cell-specific spectroscopic signatures from glioma cell lines and resolves intravoxel nontumor and tumor-specific components in vivo using the learned signatures. Results: Results from cellular mixtures and glioma-bearing mice demonstrated the potential of our method. Time-dependent, spatially-resolved tumor cell maps can be obtained, showing tumor growth in vivo. Impact: The proposed approach marks a potential new paradigm to map cellular complexity at tissue level leveraging additional imaging dimensions and machine learning. It holds the promise to provide new tools for tumor grading, progression monitoring and treatment assessment.