Ischemia is a common disorder which causes increased tissue lactate concentrations. The goal of this project is to develop improved NMR spectroscopic imaging techniques to measure lactate, lipids and other proton metabolites, in multiple volumes, in a short period of time and without requiring a high degree of field homogeneity and frequency selective water suppression. Improvements to the Fourier method of spectroscopic imaging are proposed: i. Acquistion of data with high dynamic range, for imaging proton metabolite distributions in tissues without the use of frequency selective water suppression techniques. ii. Steady-State-Free-Precession data acquisition methods for spectroscopic imaging, to maximize the efficiency of data collection for observation of lactate distributions. iii. High speed spectroscopic imaging using multiple echoes. High dynamic range acquisition will be carried out with standard spin echo, SSFP and multiple echo data acquisition methods, and a comparison of these improved Fourier imaging methods carried out. Computer processing and display utilities will be developed for clinical applications and users, to rapidly analyse and review multidimensional spectroscopic data. These techniques are to be applied for the observation of brain lactate in vivo using animal models of stroke. Subsequently these studies will be extended to observe other proton metabolites in a variety of tissues in animals, and incorporated within ongoing clinical spectroscopy studies to study patients with eschemia and malignancy. This project is ultimately expected to improve diagnosis and therapy of disorders such as stroke, myocardial ischemia and cancer.
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