ECCENTRIC: A fast and unrestrained approach for high-resolution in vivo metabolic imaging at ultra-high field MR

A novel method for fast and high-resolution metabolic imaging, called ECcentric Circle ENcoding TRajectorIes for Compressed sensing (ECCENTRIC), has been developed at 7 Tesla MRI. ECCENTRIC is a non-Cartesian spatial-spectral encoding method designed to accelerate magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) with high signal-to-noise at ultra-high field. The approach provides flexible and random sampling of the Fourier space without temporal interleaving to improve spatial response function and spectral quality. ECCENTRIC enables the implementation of spatial-spectral MRSI with reduced gradient amplitudes and slew-rates, thereby mitigating electrical, mechanical, and thermal stress of the scanner hardware. Moreover, it exhibits robustness against timing imperfections and eddy-current delay. Combined with a model-based low-rank reconstruction, this approach enables simultaneous imaging of up to 14 metabolites over the whole brain at 2-3 mm isotropic resolution in 4-10 min. MRSI ECCENTRIC was performed on four healthy volunteers, yielding high-resolution spatial mappings of neurochemical profiles within the human brain. This innovative tool introduces a novel approach to neuroscience, providing new insights into the exploration of brain activity and physiology.