Spectrum separation resolves partial-volume effect of MRSI as demonstrated on brain tumor scans

Yuzhuo Su, Sunitha B. Thakur, Sasan Karimi, Shuyan Du, Paul Sajda, Wei Huang, Lucas C. Parra

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

20 Scopus citations

Abstract

Magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) is currently used clinically in conjunction with anatomical MRI to assess the presence and extent of brain tumors and to evaluate treatment response. Unfortunately, the clinical utility of MRSI is limited by significant variability of in vivo spectra. Spectral profiles show increased variability because of partial coverage of large voxel volumes, infiltration of normal brain tissue by tumors, innate tumor heterogeneity, and measurement noise. We address these problems directly by quantifying the abundance (i.e. volume fraction) within a voxel for each tissue type instead of the conventional estimation of metabolite concentrations from spectral resonance peaks. This 'spectrum separation' method uses the non-negative matrix factorization algorithm, which simultaneously decomposes the observed spectra of multiple voxels into abundance distributions and constituent spectra. The accuracy of the estimated abundances is validated on phantom data. The presented results on 20 clinical cases of brain tumor show reduced cross-subject variability. This is reflected in improved discrimination between high-grade and low-grade gliomas, which demonstrates the physiological relevance of the extracted spectra. These results show that the proposed spectral analysis method can improve the effectiveness of MRSI as a diagnostic tool.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1030-1042
Number of pages13
JournalNMR in biomedicine
Volume21
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2008
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Brain tumor
  • Magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI)
  • Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF)
  • Tumor grade classification

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Molecular Medicine
  • Radiology Nuclear Medicine and imaging
  • Spectroscopy

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