Feasibility and reproducibility of neurochemical profile quantification in the human hippocampus at 3T
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | NMR in Biomedicine |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/nbm.3309/epdf |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/nbm.3309 |
| Field | Biophysics |
| Keywords | 3T; MRS; coefficient of variation; human hippocampus; metabolites; quantification precision; reproducibility; segmentation |
| Attached files | |
| Description | Hippocampal dysfunction is known to be associated with several neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, schizophrenia and depression; therefore, there has been significant clinical interest in studying hippocampal neurochemistry. However, the hippocampus is a challenging region to study using H-1 MRS, hence the use of MRS for clinical research in this region has been limited. Our goal was therefore to investigate the feasibility of obtaining high-quality hippocampal spectra that allow reliable quantification of a neurochemical profile and to establish inter-session reproducibility of hippocampal MRS, including reproducibility of voxel placement, spectral quality and neurochemical concentrations. Ten healthy volunteers were scanned in two consecutive sessions using a standard clinical 3T MR scanner. Neurochemical profiles were obtained with a short-echo (T-E=28ms) semi-LASER localization sequence from a relatively small (similar to 4mL) voxel that covered about 62% of the hippocampal volume as calculated from segmentation of T-1-weighted images. Voxel composition was highly reproducible between sessions, with test-retest coefficients of variation (CVs) of 3.5% and 7.5% for gray and white matter volume fraction, respectively. Excellent signal-to-noise ratio (similar to 54 based on the N-acetylaspartate (NAA) methyl peak in non-apodized spectra) and linewidths (similar to 9Hz for water) were achieved reproducibly in all subjects. The spectral quality allowed quantification of NAA, total choline, total creatine, myo-inositol and glutamate with high scan-rescan reproducibility (CV6%) and quantification precision (Cramer-Rao lower bound, CRLB<9%). Four other metabolites, including glutathione and glucose, were quantified with scan-rescan CV below 20%. Therefore, the highly optimized, short-echo semi-LASER sequence together with FASTMAP shimming substantially improved the reproducibility and number of quantifiable metabolites relative to prior reports. In addition, the between-session variation in metabolite concentrations, as well as CRLB, was lower than the between-subject variation of the concentrations for most metabolites, indicating that the method has the sensitivity to detect inter-individual differences in the healthy brain. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
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