Low- and high-grade gliomas exhibit variable clinical behavior. In-vivo metabolic profiling of these tumors could provide information complimentary to the genetic and clinical factors currently used for diagnosis and to tailor individual treatment. The purpose of this work is to characterize the metabolic profile of low- and high-grade gliomas using short echo-time ¹H spectroscopy, and to correlate metabolite levels with other unique MRI indicators of tissue abnormality such as sodium (²³Na) signal intensity. Both single voxel, and multi-voxel spectroscopy are being developed and used to achieve these goals.

Chemical shift imaging 1H MR spectroscopy analysis software developed in house is used to produce metabolite maps showing the distribution of neurchemicals like N-acetylaspartate, glutamate, myo-inositol, lactate, and lipids within and around brain tumours.	Conventional T1-weighted MRI image of a low-grade glioma and the corresponding 23Na MRI image. All images were acquired at 4 Tesla.