IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2021 Jun;68(6):2036-2046. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2021.3063061. Epub 2021 May 21.
Considering the reported elevation of ω-6/ω-3 fatty acid ratios in breast neoplasms, one particularly important application of C MRS could be in more fully understanding the breast lipidome's relationship to breast cancer incidence. However, the low natural abundance and gyromagnetic ratio of the C isotope lead to detection sensitivity challenges. Previous C MRS studies have relied on the use of small surface coils with limited field-of-view and shallow penetration depths to achieve adequate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and the use of receive array coils is still mostly unexplored.
This work presents a unilateral breast 16-channel C array coil and interfacing hardware designed to retain the surface sensitivity of a single small loop coil while improving penetration depth and extending the field-of-view over the entire breast at 7T. The coil was characterized through bench measurements and phantom C spectroscopy experiments.
Bench measurements showed receive coil matching better than -17 dB and average preamplifier decoupling of 16.2 dB with no evident peak splitting. Phantom MRS studies show better than a three-fold increase in average SNR over the entirety of the breast region compared to volume coil reception alone as well as an ability for individual array elements to be used for coarse metabolite localization without the use of single-voxel or spectroscopic imaging methods.
Our current study has shown the benefits of the array. Future in vivo lipidomics studies can be pursued.
Development of the 16-channel breast array coil opens possibilities of in vivo lipidomics studies to elucidate the link between breast cancer incidence and lipid metabolics.
鉴于报道的乳腺癌中 ω-6/ω-3 脂肪酸比例升高，CMRS 的一个特别重要的应用可能是更全面地了解乳腺脂质组与乳腺癌发病率的关系。然而，C 同位素的天然丰度低和磁旋比低导致了检测灵敏度的挑战。以前的 C MRS 研究依赖于使用小的表面线圈，其视场有限，穿透深度较浅，以实现足够的信噪比（SNR），而接收阵列线圈的使用仍在很大程度上未被探索。
本工作提出了一种单侧乳腺 16 通道 C 阵列线圈及其接口硬件，旨在保留单个小环线圈的表面灵敏度，同时提高穿透深度，并在 7T 时扩展整个乳房的视场。该线圈通过台架测量和体模 C 波谱实验进行了表征。
台架测量显示接收线圈匹配优于-17dB，平均前置放大器去耦为 16.2dB，没有明显的峰值分裂。体模 MRS 研究表明，与单独使用容积线圈接收相比，整个乳房区域的平均 SNR 提高了三倍以上，并且可以使用单个阵列元件进行粗略代谢物定位，而无需使用单像素或波谱成像方法。
我们目前的研究表明了阵列的优势。未来可以进行体内脂质组学研究。
16 通道乳腺阵列线圈的开发为阐明乳腺癌发病率与脂质代谢之间的关系的体内脂质组学研究开辟了可能性。
