Assessing brain temperature can provide important information about disease processes (e.g., stroke, trauma) and therapeutic effects (e.g., cerebral hypothermia treatment). Whole-brain magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (WB-MRSI) is increasingly used to quantify brain metabolites across the entire brain. However, its feasibility and reliability for estimating brain temperature needs further validation.Therefore, the present study evaluates the reproducibility of WB-MRSI for temperature mapping as well as metabolite quantification across the whole brain in healthy volunteers. Ten healthy adults were scanned on three occasions 1 week apart. Brain temperature, along with four commonly assessed brain metabolites-total N-acetylaspartate (tNAA), total creatine (tCr), total choline (tCho) and myo-inositol (mI)-were measured from WB-MRSI data. Reproducibility was evaluated using the coefficient of variation (CV). The measured mean (range) of the intra-subject CVs was 0.9% (0.6%-1.6%) for brain temperature mapping, and 4.7% (2.5%-15.7%), 6.4%(2.4%-18.9%) and 14.2% (4.4%-52.6%) for tNAA, tCho and mI, respectively, with reference to tCr. Consistently larger variability was found when using H 2 O as the reference for metabolite quantifications: 7.8% (3.3%-17.8%), 7.8% (3.1%-18.0%), 9.8% (3.7%-31.0%) and 17.0% (5.9%-54.0%) for tNAA, tCr, tCho and mI, respectively. Further, the larger the brain region (indicated by a greater number of voxels within that region), the better the reproducibility for both temperature and metabolite estimates. Our results demonstrate good reproducibility of whole-brain temperature and metabolite measurements using the WB-MRSI technique.
K E Y W O R D Sbrain temperature, magnetic resonance spectroscopy, reproducibility, whole-brain magnetic resonance spectroscopy Abbreviations used: 1 H-MRS, proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy; CRLB, Cramer-Rao lower bound; CV, coefficient of variation; EPSI, echo-planar spectroscopic imaging; FOV, field of view; mI, myo-inositol; MIDAS, Metabolic Imaging and Data Analysis System; MINT, Map INTegrated; ROI, region of interest; SVS, single voxel spectroscopy; tCho, total choline; tCr, total creatine; tNAA, total N-acetyl-aspartate; WB-MRSI, whole-brain magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging.