Automatic repositioning of MRSI voxels in longitudinal studies: Impact on reproducibility of metabolite concentration measurements
✍ Scribed by Eva-Maria Ratai; Ileana Hancu; Daniel J. Blezek; Katherine W. Turk; Elkan Halpern; R. Gilberto González
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2008
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 314 KB
- Volume
- 27
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1053-1807
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Abstract
Purpose
To study an automatic repositioning method to reduce variability in longitudinal MRSI exams based on a priori image registration. Longitudinal proton MR spectroscopic imaging (^1^H MRSI) exams to study the effects of disease or treatment are becoming increasingly common. However, one source of variability in such exams arises from imperfect relocalization of the MRSI grid in the follow‐up exams.
Materials and Methods
Six healthy subjects were each scanned three times during the course of 1 day. In each follow‐up exam a manually placed MRSI grid was acquired in addition to the automatically repositioned MRSI grid. Then coefficients of variance between baseline and follow‐up scans were calculated for N‐acetylaspartate, creatine, and choline. In addition, the overall MRSI grid overlap and individual voxel overlaps were also calculated for both the visually and automatically repositioned voxels.
Results
Streamlined workflow, reduced variability of metabolite concentration measurements, and increased voxel overlaps are noted when this automatic repositioning procedure is compared to the visual MRSI grid repositioning approach.
Conclusion
Our results suggest that this approach is able to improve reproducibility in longitudinal MRS exams. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2008;27:1188–1193. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.