Spiral chemical shift imaging at 3T using 32 channel receive array and online reconstruction

Magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) is an imaging technique where one obtains a spectrum of signals, e.g. brain metabolites in vivo, from particular spatial locations of interest. Conventional MRSI suffers from intrinsically long acquisition times, making this technique suitable for in vivo acquisitions only for modest spatial resolutions. Spiral MRSI is a fast encoding algorithm that plays spiral-shaped k-space trajectories repeatedly within one repetition period (TR), therefore sampling the (kx,ky,kf) space simultaneously. This offers two orders of magnitude decrease in acquisition time compared to the conventional MRSI, at no SNR cost. In this work we show implementation of the spiral MRSI algorithm on Siemens' MRI platform, and present results from in vivo experiments on healthy volunteers.