Deuterium Metabolic Imaging of the Healthy and Diseased Brain

brain metabolism contributes to pathophysiology in cerebrovascular and neurodegenerative diseases such as stroke and Alzheimer's disease. Current clinical tools to study brain metabolism rely on positron emission tomography (PET) requiring specific hardware and radiotracers, or magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) involving technical complexity. In this review we highlight deuterium metabolic imaging (DMI) as a novel translational technique for assessment of brain metabolism, with examples from brain tumor and stroke studies. DMI is an MRS-based method that enables detection of deuterated substrates, such as glucose, and their metabolic products, such as lactate, glutamate and glutamine. It provides additional detail of downstream metabolites compared to analogous approaches like fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG)-PET, and can be implemented and executed on clinical and preclinical MR systems. We foresee that DMI, with future improvements in spatial and temporal resolutions, holds promise to become a valuable MR imaging (MRI) method for noninvasive mapping of glucose uptake and its downstream metabolites in healthy and diseased brain. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Brain imaging. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of IBRO. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

Brain metabolism plays a crucial role in cerebrovascular and neurodegenerative diseases, and current clinical tools like PET and MRS have limitations. Deuterium metabolic imaging (DMI) is highlighted as a promising technique for assessing brain metabolism, providing more detailed information than traditional methods. With improvements in resolution, DMI has the potential to become a valuable noninvasive tool for mapping glucose uptake and its downstream metabolites in healthy and diseased brains.