High spatial-temporal resolution dynamic deuterium (2H) MRS imaging (DMRSI) with 3D-Checkerboard-Grappa SPICE

Motivation: Deuterium MRS imaging (DMRSI) enables mapping downstream metabolites of oxidative and non-oxidative glucose metabolism and is crucial for imaging brain tumors and neurodegenerative diseases. Goal(s): To develop a high-resolution whole-brain DMRSI acquisition tool to assess brain deuterated metabolites and their dynamics. Approach: We applied the 3D-checkerborad Grappa to acquire human whole-brain DMRSI at 7T after deuterated glucose ingestion with 2:50min scan time and 0.4cc nominal voxel size. Results: After SPICE denoising, the 3D-checkerborad Grappa DMRSI provided high spatiotemporal-resolution metabolite concentration maps, showing excellent imaging contrasts of HDO, Glx and Glucose contents across GM, WM and CSF. Impact: The proposed parallel DMRSI approach enables quantitative assessment of deuterated glucose metabolite concentrations and dynamics with higher spatiotemporal resolution throughout the human brain, making it possible to determine oxidative and non-oxidative glucose metabolic rates with improved resolution and tissue contrasts.