PCA denoising and Wiener deconvolution of ³¹P 3D CSI data to enhance effective SNR and improve point spread function

Purpose: This study evaluates the performance of 2 processing methods, that is, principal component analysis-based denoising and Wiener deconvolution, to enhance the quality of phosphorus 3D chemical shift imaging data. Methods: Principal component analysis-based denoising increases the SNR while maintaining spectral information. Wiener deconvolution reduces the FWHM of the voxel point spread function, which is increased by Hamming filtering or Hamming-weighted acquisition. The proposed methods are evaluated using simulated and in vivo 3D phosphorus chemical shift imaging data by 1) visual inspection of the spatial signal distribution; 2) SNR calculation of the PCr peak; and 3) fitting of metabolite basis functions. Results: With the optimal order of processing steps, we show that the effective SNR of in vivo phosphorus 3D chemical shift imaging data can be increased. In simulations, we show we can preserve phosphorus-containing metabolite peaks that had an SNR < 1 before denoising. Furthermore, using Wiener deconvolution, we were able to reduce the FWHM of the voxel point spread function with only partially reintroducing Gibb-ringing artifacts while maintaining the SNR. After data processing, fitting of the phosphorus-containing metabolite signals improved. Conclusion: In this study, we have shown that principal component analysis-based denoising in combination with regularized Wiener deconvolution allows increasing the effective spectral SNR of in vivo phosphorus 3D chemical shift imaging data, with reduction of the FWHM of the voxel point spread function. Processing increased the effective SNR by at least threefold compared to Hamming weighted acquired data and minimized voxel bleeding. With these methods, fitting of metabolite amplitudes became more robust with decreased fitting residuals.