Deep learning water-unsuppressed MRSI at ultra-high field for simultaneous quantitative metabolic, susceptibility and myelin water imaging
This enables simultaneous quantitative metabolic, susceptibility, and myelin water imaging in the human brain, eliminating the need for water suppression and separate acquisitions, though it is incremental as it builds on existing MRSI methods with deep learning enhancements.
The paper tackled the challenge of water-unsuppressed MRSI at ultra-high field by developing an end-to-end deep-learning pipeline, resulting in high-quality simultaneous metabolic, QSM, and MWF mapping with 2 mm isotropic resolution in 12 minutes and low error metrics such as NRMSE < 2% and bias < 20%.
Purpose: Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopic Imaging (MRSI) maps endogenous brain metabolism while suppressing the overwhelming water signal. Water-unsuppressed MRSI (wu-MRSI) allows simultaneous imaging of water and metabolites, but large water sidebands cause challenges for metabolic fitting. We developed an end-to-end deep-learning pipeline to overcome these challenges at ultra-high field. Methods:Fast high-resolution wu-MRSI was acquired at 7T with non-cartesian ECCENTRIC sampling and ultra-short echo time. A water and lipid removal network (WALINET+) was developed to remove lipids, water signal, and sidebands. MRSI reconstruction was performed by DeepER and a physics-informed network for metabolite fitting. Water signal was used for absolute metabolite quantification, quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM), and myelin water fraction imaging (MWF). Results: WALINET+ provided the lowest NRMSE (< 2%) in simulations and in vivo the smallest bias (< 20%) and limits-of-agreement (+-63%) between wu-MRSI and ws-MRSI scans. Several metabolites such as creatine and glutamate showed higher SNR in wu-MRSI. QSM and MWF obtained from wu-MRSI and GRE showed good agreement with 0 ppm/5.5% bias and +-0.05 ppm/ +- 12.75% limits-of-agreement. Conclusion: High-quality metabolic, QSM, and MWF mapping of the human brain can be obtained simultaneously by ECCENTRIC wu-MRSI at 7T with 2 mm isotropic resolution in 12 min. WALINET+ robustly removes water sidebands while preserving metabolite signal, eliminating the need for water suppression and separate water acquisitions.