Tejas Jatin Shah1,2, Lan Lu2, Paul R. Ernsberger3, Christopher Allan Flask1,2
1Biomedical Engineering, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA; 2Department of Radiology, University Hospitals of Cleveland, Cleveland, OH, USA; 3Department of Nutrition, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
In vivo and non-invasive measures of hepatic and muscular glycogen are needed to effectively study diabetes and metabolism in humans and animals. More recently, glycogens inherent CEST effect has been proposed as an alternative to C13-MRS1. While this initial GlycoCEST work is promising, the in vivo utility of the GlycoCEST technique is limited because of the long acquisition times (1-3 hours) for quantitative CEST-MRI acquisitions. In this study, we have developed and optimized a rapid GlycoCEST acquisition using our recently developed FISP-CEST technique to obtain quantitative glycogen CEST spectra in phantoms and ex vivo livers in 15-45 minutes.