Spatio-temporal reconstruction of substance dynamics using compressed sensing in multi-spectral magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging

The objective of our study is to observe dynamics of multiple substances in vivo with high temporal resolution from multi-spectral magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) data. The multi-spectral MRSI can effectively separate spectral peaks of multiple substances and is useful to measure spatial distributions of substances. However it is difficult to measure time-varying substance distributions directly by ordinary full sampling because the measurement requires a significantly long time. In this study, we propose a novel method to reconstruct the spatio-temporal distributions of substances from randomly undersampled multi-spectral MRSI data on the basis of compressed sensing (CS) and the partially separable function model with base spectra of substances. In our method, we have employed spatio-temporal sparsity and temporal smoothness of the substance distributions as prior knowledge to perform CS. The effectiveness of our method has been evaluated using phantom data sets of glass tubes filled with glucose or lactate solution in increasing amounts over time and animal data sets of a tumor-bearing mouse to observe the metabolic dynamics involved in the Warburg effect in vivo. The reconstructed results are consistent with the expected behaviors, showing that our method can reconstruct the spatio-temporal distribution of substances with a temporal resolution of four seconds which is extremely short time scale compared with that of full sampling. Since this method utilizes only prior knowledge naturally assumed for the spatio-temporal distributions of substances and is independent of the number of the spectral and spatial dimensions or the acquisition sequence of MRSI, it is expected to contribute to revealing the underlying substance dynamics in MRSI data already acquired or to be acquired in the future.