Proton MR spectroscopic imaging without water suppression.

To improve reproducibility in proton magnetic resonance (MR) spectroscopic imaging in human brain, simultaneous acquisition of the internal water reference and metabolite signals was evaluated. Measurements in healthy volunteers showed that the increase in dynamic range from signal oversampling was sufficient to avoid digitization errors. In addition, use of singular value decomposition techniques and finite impulse response filters proved effective in separating water and metabolite signals and providing estimates of the metabolite concentrations.

Simple correction method for k-space trajectory deviations in MRI.

A method is presented to correct for the imperfections of spatial encoding gradients in MRI. The approach is simple and fast, can be performed with standard scanner hardware, and does not require separate measurements with reference phantoms. The new method, using the MR signal to accurately measure the k-space trajectory of the imaging sequence, allows for correction of gradient hardware imperfections and eddy-current effects. Initial measurements are presented which demonstrate the efficacy of the method to correct images acquired with spiral and EPI scan techniques.

Diffusion in red blood cell suspensions: separation of the intracellular and extracellular NMR sodium signal.

It is shown that the signal of intracellular and extracellular sodium of red blood cells can be separated by a difference in diffusion. Comparison with proton diffusion experiments conducted in parallel showed that this difference was caused by restriction to the cell volume. The measured proton and sodium root mean square displacements agreed well with the cell dimensions. However, this experiment is limited to use in vitro by the required gradient strength.

Alteration of nitrogen metabolism by alpha-ketoglutarate administration in growing lambs fed high nonprotein nitrogen-containing diets.

Two completely randomized design experiments were conducted, using either 10, 38-kg (Exp. 1) or 10, 26-kg (Exp. 2) Hampshire x Western wether lambs, to study the effects of alpha-ketoglutarate (AKG) administration on N metabolism. Lambs were fed 890 and 885 g DM/d in Exp. 1 and 2, respectively, of corn-cottonseed hull basal diets with urea added to attain CP levels of 10.6 and 10.5% in Exp. 1 and 2, respectively. Experiments consisted of 10 d of adaptation followed by 7 d of infusion and excreta collection. Lambs were infused continuously either i.v. (Exp. 1) or abomasally (Exp. 2) with control solutions (CON) or solutions containing 41.3 g AKG/d (AKG). In Exp. 1, fecal and urinary N excretion and N retention were not affected (P greater than .10) by treatment. Compared to CON in Exp. 2, AKG infusion increased (P less than .10) fecal N output (6.6 vs 5.9 g N/d) but did not affect (P greater than .10) the amount of N retained (4.4 vs 3.5 g N/d). Compared to CON, AKG increased (P less than .10) urinary NH3 N excretion in Exp. 1. Serum urea N was lower (P greater than .10) for AKG than for CON in Exp. 1 but was not affected (P greater than .10) by treatment in Exp. 2. In Exp. 1, AKG appeared to reduce activities of several serum enzymes that function in amino N metabolism. In Exp. 1, compared to CON, AKG decreased (P less than .10) aspartate but increased (P less than .10) asparagine in serum.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Accurate quantification of in vivo 31P NMR signals using the variable projection method and prior knowledge.

Free induction decay signals are analyzed by fitting a model function directly in the time domain. No starting values are needed for linear model parameters, and omission of corrupted data points poses no problems. A significant gain of accuracy is achieved by imposing prior knowledge about the model parameters.