Compressed Sensing MPRAGE accelerates automated voxel placement for 1-H MRS of the human brain

The automated voxel placement (AVP) framework has been proposed to optimize accuracy and reproducibility in single-voxel brain proton spectroscopy. AVP is based on the affine transformation of brain coordinates from standard to subject-specific space defined on a 3D T1-weighted structural scan. Here we evaluate the robustness of the AVP approach by evaluating the displacement of voxel center coordinates across 3D T1w MPRAGE sequence variants, including compressed sensing (CS) accelerated protocols. We show that AVP gave small but significantly higher voxel displacements for MP2RAGE and CS-MP2RAGE. There were no significant differences between multi-echo MPRAGE (6 min) and CS-MPRAGE (1 min).