Imaging of hyperpolarized (HP) agents permits real-time non-invasive measurement of metabolic flux, however these experiments require specialized techniques for rapidly encoding chemical shift in a way that is sensitive metabolic signals that are often low SNR. The SNR performance of two chemical shift encoding methods commonly used for HP 13C MRI, IDEAL and spectral-spatial excitation pulses, were compared for a typical preclinical experiment imaging [1-13C]pyruvate at 7 T. The SNR of these two techniques were found to be equivalent in numerical simulation, while the SNR measured for IDEAL was ~30% greater than for spectral-spatial pulses in a thermal phantom experiment.
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