# Deep learning water-unsuppressed MRSI at ultra-high field for simultaneous quantitative metabolic, susceptibility and myelin water imaging

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14929 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14929/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [ECCENTRIC: a fast and unrestrained approach for high-resolution in vivo metabolic imaging at ultra-high field MR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13822/) (2023)
- [Deep-ER: Deep Learning ECCENTRIC Reconstruction for fast high-resolution neurometabolic imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18303/) (2024)
- [WALINET: A water and lipid identification convolutional Neural Network for nuisance signal removal in 1H MR Spectroscopic Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00746/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Purpose: Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopic Imaging (MRSI) maps endogenous brain metabolism while suppressing the overwhelming water signal. Water-unsuppressed MRSI (wu-MRSI) allows simultaneous imaging of water and metabolites, but large water sidebands cause challenges for metabolic fitting. We developed an end-to-end deep-learning pipeline to overcome these challenges at ultra-high field. Methods:Fast high-resolution wu-MRSI was acquired at 7T with non-cartesian ECCENTRIC sampling and ultra-short echo time. A water and lipid removal network (WALINET+) was developed to remove lipids, water signal, and sidebands. MRSI reconstruction was performed by DeepER and a physics-informed network for metabolite fitting. Water signal was used for absolute metabolite quantification, quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM), and myelin water fraction imaging (MWF). Results: WALINET+ provided the lowest NRMSE (< 2%) in simulations and in vivo the smallest bias (< 20%) and limits-of-agreement (+-63%) between wu-MRSI and ws-MRSI scans. Several metabolites such as creatine and glutamate showed higher SNR in wu-MRSI. QSM and MWF obtained from wu-MRSI and GRE showed good agreement with 0 ppm/5.5% bias and +-0.05 ppm/ +- 12.75% limits-of-agreement. Conclusion: High-quality metabolic, QSM, and MWF mapping of the human brain can be obtained simultaneously by ECCENTRIC wu-MRSI at 7T with 2 mm isotropic resolution in 12 min. WALINET+ robustly removes water sidebands while preserving metabolite signal, eliminating the need for water suppression and separate water acquisitions.