Comparison of Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer (CEST) and T1ρ MRI for Measurement of Proton Chemical Exchange Between Metabolites and Water at 7T

Feliks Kogan¹, Walter Witschey¹, Keijia Cai¹, Mohammad Haris¹, Ravinder Reddy¹

Recent work on imaging chemical exchange processeshas been focused on exploitingchemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST). T1ρ imaging is another imaging technique which depends on chemical exchange which can be used to image metabolites based on their proton exchange properties. In this study, we compared the sensitivities of these two techniques for measuring metabolites based on proton exchange. We observed that at 7T, T1ρ imaging has a higher sensitivity to exchanges processes compared to that of CEST.