Implementation of wavelet encoding spectroscopic imaging technique on a 3 Tesla whole body MR scanner: In vitro results

Proton magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) provides spatial information about tissue metabolite concentrations used in differentiating diseased from normal tissue. Obtaining metabolic maps with high spatial resolution requires long acquisition time where the patient has to lie still inside the magnet bore (scanner) especially if classical Chemical Shift Imaging (CSI) is used. To reduce acquisition time and obtain a more accurate metabolite distribution with low voxel contamination in MRSI, we have recently proposed and successfully implemented a full Wavelet Encoding-Spectroscopic Imaging (WE-SI) technique on a 1.5 Tesla whole body MR clinical scanner. In this paper we describe the implementation of the WE-SI technique at higher magnetic field strength (B0) on a clinical 3 Tesla Siemens scanner equipped with parallel imaging tools for better sensitivity. This increases the signal to noise ratio (SNR) and allows combination of the proposed technique with the so-called parallel imaging approach for further acquisition time reduction.