Repeatability of Creatine Recovery Constants in Exercise Muscle Measured using  3D Creatine Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer Imaging at 7T

Creatine CEST is a relatively new imaging technique, with the proven potential to assess the systemic energy deficiency in form of delayed creatine recovery in exercised skeletal muscles. However, this 2D method still suffers from limited volume coverage in slice encoding direction. Since the distribution of disease in many musculoskeletal disorders may vary across the muscle, there is a need to increase coverage in slice encoding direction. Towards this goal, we demonstrate the feasibility of 3D CrCEST, while still maintaining 30s time resolution necessary to capture underlying dynamics and also demonstrate its repeatability using data from five healthy volunteers.