Cell-Resolved MR Spectroscopic Signatures for Cancer Cells Mapping: Dual-State Subspaces and GFP-Labeled Glioma Mouse Validation

Motivation: Monitoring of tumor progression and therapeutic efficacy will benefit from in vivo imaging technologies that can estimate cancer-cell-specific fractions at the tissue level. Goal(s): To continue developing an MRSI-based method to resolve tumor-cell-specific components within individual imaging voxels. Approach: We combined glioma-cell-specific metabolite profiles at different states and high-resolution MRSI data to resolve glioma cell fractions, validated using GFP-labeled glioma mice. Results: In vivo, in vitro, and ex vivo results demonstrated the effectiveness of our method in resolving tumor cell distribution and monitoring tumor progression. Impact: The proposed approach can assess cell-specific tissue responses, with significant potentials for tumor staging, treatment assessment, and recurrence detections.