Phillip Zhe Sun1, A Gregory Sorensen1
1Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, USA
Amide proton transfer (APT) imaging has been shown sensitive to microenvironment pH and can detect ischemic tissue acidosis. However, the commonly used magnetization transfer (MT) asymmetry analysis is susceptible to concomitant RF irradiation effects (spillover, intrinsically asymmetric MT etc), and hence, may not be specific to pH-dependent APT mechanism. Here, we propose a compensatory APT ratio (CAPTOR) approach that subtracts the label scan (famide) from the mean of two compensatory images around the amide proton offset instead of a reference scan (-famide). Our data showed that CAPTOR had less heterogeneity among cerebral tissue types, and more specific to APT process.