Evaluation of cerebral 31-P chemical shift images utilizing statistical parametric mapping

We present an evaluation technique of two dimensional (2D) nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) chemical shift images (CSI) to analyze spatial differences of metabolite distributions and/or concentrations between groups of probands. Thus, chemical shift imaging is not only used as localization technique for NMR-spectroscopy, but the information of the complete spectroscopic image is used for the evaluation process. 31P CSI of the human brain were acquired with a Philips Gyroscan ACSII whole-body scanner at 1.5 T. CSI for different phosphorus metabolites were generated, all representing the same anatomical location. For each metabolite the CSI of two groups of subjects were compared with each other using the general linear model implemented in the widely distributed SPM96 software package. With this approach, even covariates or confounding variables like age or medication can be considered. As an example for the application of this technique, variations in the distribution of the 31P metabolite phosphocreatin between unmedicated schizophrenic patients and healthy controls were visualized. To our knowledge, this is the first approach to analyze spatial variations in metabolite concentrations between groups of subjects on the basis of chemical shift images. The presented technique opens a new perspective in the evaluation of 2D NMR spectroscopic data.