Yoshitaka Bito1,
Yuko Kawai2, Koji Hirata1, Toshihiko Ebisu3,
Toru Shirai1, Satoshi Hirata1, Yoshihisa Soutome1,
Hisaaki Ochi1, Masahiro Umeda2, Toshihiro Higuchi4,
Chuzo Tanaka4
1Central
Research Laboratory, Hitachi, Ltd., Kokubunji-shi, Tokyo, Japan; 2Medical
Informatics, Meiji University of Integrative Medicine, Kyoto, Japan; 3Neurosurgery,
Nantan General Hospital, Kyoto, Japan; 4Neurosurgery, Meiji
University of Integrative Medicine, Kyoto, Japan
A diffusion-weighted echo-planar spectroscopic imaging with a pair of bipolar diffusion gradients (DW-EPSI with BPGs) was applied to acquire apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) changes of N-acetylaspartate (NAA) after a right middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) in rat brains. Acquired changes in ADC maps of NAA after MCAO were analyzed by using Gaussian mixture distribution, which can handle many spatial pixels acquired simultaneously by diffusion-weighted spectroscopic imaging. It is shown that DW-EPSI with BPGs is effective for investigating spatially varying ADC changes of metabolites and that this technique may be useful for understanding intra-cellular dynamics of neurons by using NAA as a probe.