Recent technical developments and clinical research applications of sodium (23Na) MRI

Sodium is an essential ion that plays a central role in many physiological processes including the transmembrane electrochemical gradient and the maintenance of the body’s homeostasis. Due to the crucial role of sodium in the human body, the sodium nucleus is a promising candidate for non-invasively assessing (patho-)physiological changes. Almost 10 years ago, Madelin et al. provided a comprehensive review of methods and applications of sodium (23Na) MRI (Madelin et al., 2014) 1. More recent review articles have focused mainly on specific applications of 23Na MRI. For example, several articles covered 23Na MRI applications for diseases such as osteoarthritis (Zbyn et al., 2016, Zaric et al., 2020) [2, 3], multiple sclerosis (Petracca et al., 2016, Huhn et al., 2019) [4, 5] and brain tumors (Schepkin, 2016) 6, or for imaging certain organs such as the kidneys (Zollner et al., 2016) 7, the brain (Shah et al., 2016, Thulborn et al., 2018) [8, 9], and the heart (Bottomley, 2016) 10. Other articles have reviewed technical developments such as radiofrequency (RF) coils for 23Na MRI (Wiggins et al., 2016, Bangerter et al., 2016) [11, 12], pulse sequences (Konstandin et al., 2014) 13, image reconstruction methods (Chen et al., 2021) 14, and interleaved/simultaneous imaging techniques (Lopez Kolkovsky et al., 2022) 15. In addition, 23Na MRI topics have been covered in review articles with broader topics such as multinuclear MRI or ultra-high-field MRI (Niesporek et al., 2019, Hu et al., 2019, Ladd et al., 2018) [16, 17, 18]. During the past decade, various research groups have continued working on technical improvements to sodium MRI and have investigated its potential to serve as a diagnostic and prognostic tool. Clinical research applications of 23Na MRI have covered a broad spectrum of diseases, mainly focusing on the brain, cartilage, and skeletal muscle (see Fig. 1). In this article, we aim to provide a comprehensive summary of methodological and hardware developments, as well as a review of various clinical research applications of sodium (23Na) MRI in the last decade (i.e., published from the beginning of 2013 to the end of 2022).