Gilbert Hangel1,
Bernhard Strasser1, Stephan Gruber1, Marek Chmelik1,
Siegfried Trattnig1, Wolfgang Bogner1, 2
1MR
Centre of Excellence, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria; 2Athinoula
A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology,
Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United
States
This work compares metabolic maps of pulse-cascaded four-slice Hadamard Spectroscopic Imaging (HSI) with short acquisition delay to standard single slice 2D-CSI at 7T. HSI overcomes point-spread function problems in slice encoding direction and enables the measurement of few slices with high in-plane resolution in acceptable measurement time making full use of the high SNR at 7T. Pulse cascading reduces B1 requirements, specific absorption rates, and chemical shift displacement errors. The short acquisition delay maximizes SNR and avoids J-coupling effects. Measurements in eight volunteers show the good comparability of metabolic maps between HSI and CSI as well as the Hadamard-specific SNR-increase.