Deuterium Metabolic Imaging (DMI)

A novel MR-based method to map metabolism in 3D

Non‐invasive imaging of metabolic pathways in neurological disease has been a long‐standing goal to monitor disease progression or therapy efficacy. Positron emission tomography (PET) in combination with 2‐¹⁸F‐fluoro‐2‐deoxy‐D‐glucose (FDG) is currently the only clinically viable metabolic imaging method. However, the high uptake of FDG by normal brain drastically reduces the image contrast and the usefulness of FDG‐PET in studying neurological disease. MR‐based methods (¹H, ¹³C, hyperpolarized ¹³C MRS) are promising but have failed to reach clinical significance due to technical complexity and lack of robustness and/or sensitivity. Deuterium metabolic imaging (DMI) is a novel MR‐based method that uses the favorable MR characteristics of deuterium to map metabolism in vivo in 3D. The low intrinsic sensitivity of ²H NMR is offset by favorable T₁ and T₂ relaxation times, a large nuclear spin and a sparse NMR spectrum devoid of strong water and lipid signals. By combining ²H NMR with deuterated glucose administration (oral or intravenous), MR spectroscopic imaging and signal quantification through spectral fitting we were able to generate deuterium metabolic images of brain, brain tumor and liver metabolism in vivo. Our first‐in‐human DMI maps of glucose metabolism in healthy brain and in patients with high grade brain tumors illustrate that DMI has the potential to become a robust and widely applicable brain imaging method with strong clinical utility.In my talk I will present the concepts of compressed sensing accelerated, self-gated 4D and 5D Flow MRI as I implemented it on a Philips system during my PhD and Postdoc. I will also show the concept and the advantages of encoding turbulence in Flow MRI scans.

https://medicine.yale.edu/profile/robin_degraaf/

The lecture will be held as a zoom meeting, please connect using:

https://unibe‐ch.zoom.us/j/66256483922?pwd=aE1kTFg5aUZza1JmWEJxZDVsdnV5dz09

For further info please contact: karin.zwygart@insel.ch