Accelerating CEST MRI in the mouse brain at 9.4 T by exploiting sparsity in the Z‐spectrum domain

Purpose Chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) is an MR contrast modality offering an enhanced sensitivity for the detection of dilute metabolites with exchangeable protons. Quantitative analysis requires the acquisition of a number of images (usually between 20 and 50 RF offsets) per Z ‐spectrum, leading to long acquisition times of the order of 5‐40 min in practice. In this work, we explore the possibility of employing sparsity in the Z...