A subspace approach to high-resolution spectroscopic imaging

Purpose: To accelerate spectroscopic imaging using sparse sampling of (k,t)-space and subspace (or low-rank) modeling to enable high-resolution metabolic imaging with good signal-to-noise ratio.

Methods: The proposed method, called SPectroscopic Imaging by exploiting spatiospectral CorrElation, exploits a unique property known as partial separability of spectroscopic signals. This property indicates that high-dimensional spectroscopic signals reside in a very low-dimensional subspace and enables special data acquisition and image reconstruction strategies to be used to obtain high-resolution spatiospectral distributions with good signal-to-noise ratio. More specifically, a hybrid chemical shift imaging/echo-planar spectroscopic imaging pulse sequence is proposed for sparse sampling of (k,t)-space, and a low-rank model-based algorithm is proposed for subspace estimation and image reconstruction from sparse data with the capability to incorporate prior information and field inhomogeneity correction.

Results: The performance of the proposed method has been evaluated using both computer simulations and phantom studies, which produced very encouraging results. For two-dimensional spectroscopic imaging experiments on a metabolite phantom, a factor of 10 acceleration was achieved with a minimal loss in signal-to-noise ratio compared to the long chemical shift imaging experiments and with a significant gain in signal-to-noise ratio compared to the accelerated echo-planar spectroscopic imaging experiments.

Conclusion: The proposed method, SPectroscopic Imaging by exploiting spatiospectral CorrElation, is able to significantly accelerate spectroscopic imaging experiments, making high-resolution metabolic imaging possible.