New article by Pandi Veeraiah

Pandi, together with Kim Brouwers, Joachim Wildberger, Vera Schrauwen-Hinderling, and Lucas Lindeboom, published a new article on the 3rd of July on a new MR sequence for 13C-tracking experiments in human liver in Vivo titled: ” “. This article is published in Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and the full article can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1002/mrm.28394

Read the abstract below:

PURPOSE: Recently, we introduced a quantum coherence based method (ge‐HSQC) for indirect ¹³C‐MRS in the liver to track ¹³C‐labeled lipids into the hepatic lipid pool in vivo. This approach is more robust in case of respiratory motion, however, inherently leads to a signal loss of 50% when compared with a conventional J‐difference editing technique (JDE). Here, we intend to improve the robustness of a regular JDE (STEAM‐ACED) with the use of a BIlinear Rotation Decoupling (BIRD) filter to achieve 100% higher signal gain when compared with ge‐HSQC.
METHODS: To determine the efficiency of the BIRD filter ¹H‐[¹³C] lipid spectra were acquired on 3T from a peanut oil phantom, with three different MR sequences: ge‐HSQC, STEAM‐ACED, and the BIRD filter together with STEAM‐ACED (BIRD‐STEAM‐ACED). Finally, our proposed method is tested in vivo in five healthy volunteers with varying liver fat content. In these subjects we quantified the ¹H‐[¹³C]‐signal from the hepatic lipid pool and determined ¹³C enrichment, which is expected to be 1.1% according to the natural abundance of ¹³C.
RESULTS: The application of the proposed BIRD filter reduces the subtraction artifact of ¹H‐[¹²C] lipid signal efficiently in JDE experiments, which leads to a signal gain of 100% of ¹H‐[¹³C]‐lipid signals when compared with the ge‐HSQC. Phase distortions in vivo were minimal with the use of BIRD compared with STEAM‐ACED, which enabled us to robustly quantify the ¹³C‐enrichment in all five subjects.
CONCLUSION: The BIRD‐STEAM‐ACED sequence is an efficient and promising tool for ¹³C‐tracking experiments in the human liver in vivo.