1Department
of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California, San Francisco,
San Francisco, CA, United States; 2UC Berkeley-UCSF Graduate
Program in Bioengineering, Berkeley and San Francisco, CA, United States; 3Magnetic
Resonance Systems Research Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering,
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States; 4Department of
Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California San Francisco, San
Francisco, CA, United States; 5Department of Medicine, University
of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
Using MAD-STEAM single-voxel acquisition and reconstruction, real-time conversion can be directly observed, which may provide increased specificity for monitoring intracellular enzyme activity. Extending the method to dynamic MAD-STEAM MRSI provides improved localization of those changes, which can better differentiate tumor versus normal. In transgenic models of cancer, real-time generation of lactate was observed in a tumor and increased conversion to alanine was observed during tumor formation. This new technique has great biomedical potential as it could be used to better measure and understand tumor metabolic changes with cancer progression and response to therapy.