NMR in biomedicine
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Endogenous chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) effects are always diluted by competing effects, such as direct water proton saturation (spillover) and semi-solid macromolecular magnetization transfer (MT). This leads to unwanted T2 and MT signal contributions that lessen the CEST signal specificity to the underlying biochemical exchange processes. A spillover correction is of special interest for clinical static field strengths and protons resonating near the water peak. ⋯ We demonstrate that spillover can be properly corrected and that quantitative evaluation of pH and creatine concentration is possible. This proves that MTRRex is a quantitative and biophysically specific CEST-MRI metric. Applied to acute stroke induced in rat brain, the corrected CEST signal shows significantly higher contrast between the stroke area and normal tissue, as well as less B1 dependence, than conventional approaches.
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Magnetization transfer (MT) provides an indirect means to detect noninvasively variations in macromolecular contents in biological tissues, but, so far, there have been only a few quantitative MT (qMT) studies reported in cancer, all of which used off-resonance pulsed saturation methods. This article describes the first implementation of a different qMT approach, selective inversion recovery (SIR), for the characterization of tumor in vivo using a rodent glioma model. The SIR method is an on-resonance method capable of fitting qMT parameters and T1 relaxation time simultaneously without mapping B0 and B1 , which is very suitable for high-field qMT measurements because of the lower saturation absorption rate. ⋯ In addition, the influence of confounding effects, e.g. B1 inhomogeneity, on qMT parameter estimates is investigated with numerical simulations. These findings not only help to better understand the changes in the macromolecular contents of tumors, but are also important for the interpretation of other imaging contrasts, such as chemical exchange saturation transfer of tumors.