Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS)1-4 is a method for non-invasively probing metabolism. The major nuclei studied by MRS methods in the heart include 1H (for measures of fat fraction, creatine content, etc), 31P (for measures of energy transport through the creatine-kinase system in the form of ATP, phosphocreatine, and their kinetics, and for determination of pH), 13C (for stable-isotope tracer studies, and more recently with hyperpolarised pyruvate to study glycolysis), and more recently 17O (to trace oxidative respiration) and other nuclei. This lecture provides an overview of the major methods of cardiac spectroscopy and their contributions to biomedicine.
Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS)1-4 is a method for non-invasively probing metabolism. The major nuclei studied by MRS methods in the heart include 1H (for measures of fat fraction, creatine content, etc), 31P (for measures of energy transport through the creatine-kinase system in the form of ATP, phosphocreatine, and their kinetics, and for determination of pH), 13C (for stable-isotope tracer studies, and more recently with hyperpolarised pyruvate to study glycolysis), and more recently 17O (to trace oxidative respiration) and other nuclei. This lecture provides an overview of the major methods of cardiac spectroscopy and their contributions to biomedicine.
I will also discuss how cardiac spectroscopy benefits from scanning at ultra-high field. This improves: (i) the signal-to-noise ratio for a fixed scan time increases approximately proportional to B0; and (ii) the frequency separation between the peaks from different metabolites increases proportional to B0 which makes robust spectral fitting easier.
1 De Graaf, RA. In vivo NMR spectroscopy: principles and techniques. 2nd edn, (John Wiley & Sons, 2007).
2 Bottomley, PA. in Encyclopedia of Magnetic Resonance (eds R. K. Harris & R. E. Wasylishen) (John Wiley, 2009).
3 Levitt, MH. Spin dynamics : basics of nuclear magnetic resonance. 2nd edn, (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).
4 Ernst, RR, Bodenhausen, G & Wokaun, A. Principles of nuclear magnetic resonance in one and two dimensions. (Clarendon Press, 1987).