Imaging of Glutamate in the Spinal Cord Using Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer (CEST) at 7T

Feliks Kogan¹, ², Anup Singh¹, Mohammad Haris¹, Kejia Cai¹, Hari Hariharan¹, Ravinder Reddy¹

Glutamate (Glu) is the primary neurotransmitter that is responsible for excitatory synaptic transmission in the brain stem and spinal cord and plays a wide role in neuropathology. Glu exhibits a CEST effect which is linearly proportional to the Glu concentration. In this work, we demonstrated that it is feasible to detect the CEST effect from glutamate in the cervical spinal cord at 7T with high spatial resolution. We showed that the spinal cord Glu CEST map demonstrates a distinct gray and white matter distribution pattern. Finally, we demonstrated from phantom data that the majority of the CEST contrast in the spinal cord is due to glutamate.