Cardiac CEST MRI under the influence of very short saturation pulses – an analysis approach

Cardiac CEST MRI in mice rely on the application of very short saturation pulses. These pulses cause disturbing signal modulation in the CEST spectrum preventing a consistent data analysis. To correct for this, an additional approach named DOSE was established in the data analysis pipeline. The DOSE-corrected analysis was validated in vitro on a glucose concentration series as well as in vivo on cardiac glucoCEST experiments of nine healthy mice. Hereby, oscillations in the CEST spectra could be reduced substantially ensuring a consistent quantification.