The role of gray and white matter segmentation in quantitative proton MR spectroscopic imaging

Since the brain's gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) metabolite concentrations differ, their partial volumes can vary the voxel's 1H MR spectroscopy (1H‐MRS) signal, reducing sensitivity to changes. While single‐voxel 1H‐MRS cannot differentiate between WM and GM signals, partial volume correction is feasible by MR spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) using segmentation of the MRI acquired for VOI placement. To determine the magnitude of this effect on metabolic quantification, we segmented a 1‐mm3 resolution MRI into GM, WM and CSF masks that were co‐registered with the MRSI grid to yield their partial volumes in approximately every 1 cm3 spectroscopic voxel. Each voxel then provided one equation with two unknowns: its i‐ metabolite's GM and WM concentrations CiGM, CiWM. With the voxels' GM and WM volumes as independent coefficients, the over‐determined system of equations was solved for the global averaged CiGM and CiWM. Trading off local concentration differences offers three advantages: (i) higher sensitivity due to combined data from many voxels; (ii) improved specificity to WM versus GM changes; and (iii) reduced susceptibility to partial volume effects. These improvements made no additional demands on the protocol, measurement time or hardware. Applying this approach to 18 volunteered 3D MRSI sets of 480 voxels each yielded N‐acetylaspartate, creatine, choline and myo‐inositol CiGM concentrations of 8.5 ± 0.7, 6.9 ± 0.6, 1.2 ± 0.2, 5.3 ± 0.6mM, respectively, and CiWM concentrations of 7.7 ± 0.6, 4.9 ± 0.5, 1.4 ± 0.1 and 4.4 ± 0.6mM, respectively. We showed that unaccounted voxel WM or GM partial volume can vary absolute quantification by 5–10% (more for ratios), which can often double the sample size required to establish statistical significance. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The global concentration of brain metabolites varies between gray and white tissue, leading to partial volume effects, which can be accounted for by combining multi‐voxel spectroscopy, image segmentation and least squares fitting in post‐processing. We showed that unaccounted tissue partial volume can vary absolute quantification by 5‐10% (more for ratios), which can often double the sample size required to establish statistical significance. Tissue metabolite concentrations were quantified for 18 healthy volunteers.