Motivation: For glioma patients undergoing treatment, the current criteria for evaluating treatment response only use anatomical MRI images, providing insufficient information for challenging cases like pseudo-progression and pseudo-response. Goal(s): Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer (CEST) imaging of the tumor region can provide metabolic information for prognosis and treatment response evaluation. Approach: High-resolution CEST acquisition at 7T is implemented in the multi-modal brain cancer trial for baseline and after-treatment scans. Results: CEST scan of the glioma region provides crucial metabolic information that cannot be retrieved from anatomical images alone. Impact: In combination with the clinical anatomical images, acquiring CEST data for glioma patients at 7T is beneficial for the monitoring of tumor progression and the evaluation of treatment response.
Lan et al. (Tue,) studied this question.