PROJECT TITLE :

Kinetic Modeling of Hyperpolarized Carbon-13 Pyruvate Metabolism in the Human Brain

ABSTRACT:

Modeling pyruvate to lactate conversion in vivo is essential to understanding abnormal cancer metabolism that exhibits Warburg effect changes. The ability to identify changes in metabolic flux non-invasively could be useful for early diagnosis and better treatment response monitoring. Hyperpolarized [1- 13 C] pyruvate was given intravenously into 10 patients with brain tumours in order to determine the rate of lactate (k PL) and bicarbonate (k PB) conversion by echo-planar imaging in this clinical research endeavour. Our goal was to find novel ways to cover the entire brain in k PL and k PB maps. Data-driven analysis was used to pick the best model for fitting our data and to calculate an appropriate goodness-of-fit value for the model. According to the results of the statistical analysis, the best agreement with the data was found in an input-less model. When voxels were chosen based on post-fitting error criteria, greater precision and coverage were obtained than when signal-to-noise cutoffs were just used.