In vivo assessment of the ω-3 fatty acid fraction using 1H MR imaging at 3 Tesla

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ω-3 fatty acids belong to the group of essential fatty acids that mammals cannot synthesize and therefore have to be obtained through diet. The metabolism of ω-3 fatty acids is of high interest as its role is not completely understood in the pathophysiological context of the metabolic syndrome. Previous studies investigating the effects of ω-3 fatty acids in the context of the metabolic syndrome were predominantly based on blood samples and biopsies and were therefore not able to gain insights in the potential organ and tissue specific patterns of ω-3 fatty acids levels. Single-voxel 1H magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) and 1H magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are widely available methods that allow the non-invasive in vivo probing of tissue characteristics. While single-voxel MRS allows to acquire signals with high spectral resolution based on their chemical shift differences with very limited spatial information, MRI allows to obtain spatially-resolved information but requires advanced signal modeling techniques and prior knowledge to extract chemical shift-related characteristics due to limited spectral information. Previously, there have been many efforts using MRI to extract the triglyceride profile characteristics which describe the fatty acid composition in terms of the fraction of saturated, mono-unsaturated and poly-unsaturated fatty acids. The present project proposal is aiming for going beyond the existing metric aiming to image not only the fraction of saturated, mono-unsaturated and poly-unsaturated fatty acid fractions but also to assess the fraction of ω-3 fatty acid content to allow further insights into the ω-3 fatty acid metabolism.