Post-acquisition water-signal removal in 3D water-unsuppressed 1 H-MR spectroscopic imaging of the prostate

To develop a robust processing procedure of raw signals from water-unsuppressed MRSI of the prostate for the mapping of absolute tissue concentrations of metabolites. Water-unsuppressed 3D MRSI data were acquired from a phantom, from healthy volunteers, and a patient with prostate cancer. Signal processing included sequential computation of the modulus of the FID to remove water sidebands, a Hilbert transformation, and k-space Hamming filtering. For the removal of the water signal, we compared Löwner tensor-based blind source separation (BSS) and Hankel Lanczos singular value decomposition techniques. Absolute metabolite levels were quantified with LCModel and the results were statistically analyzed to compare the water removal methods and conventional water-suppressed MRSI. The post-processing algorithms successfully removed the water signal and its sidebands without affecting metabolite signals. The best water removal performance was achieved by Löwner tensor-based BSS. Absolute tissue concentrations of citrate in the peripheral zone derived from water-suppressed and unsuppressed H MRSI were the same and as expected from the known physiology of the healthy prostate. Maps for citrate and choline from water-unsuppressed 3D H-MRSI of the prostate showed expected spatial variations in metabolite levels. We developed a robust relatively simple post-processing method of water-unsuppressed MRSI of the prostate to remove the water signal. Absolute quantification using the water signal, originating from the same location as the metabolite signals, avoids the acquisition of additional reference data.