A phase rotation scheme for achieving very short echo times with localized stimulated echo spectroscopy.

In a single-voxel stimulated echo localization sequence in magnetic resonance spectroscopy, magnetic field gradients are inserted within the echo time (TE) to filter signals generated through coherence pathways other than that leading to the stimulated echo. There is a significant penalty for these gradients as they increase the minimum TE, thereby leading to significant signal loss from spin-spin relaxation and phase distortions in coupled spin systems. Here, an RF phase rotation technique is described for a stimulated echo localization sequence that allows removal of the gradients in the TE intervals and, subsequently, reduction of the minimum TE to only 6 ms. Experiments carried out on six healthy volunteers on a 1.5-T whole-body MR system show a significant signal increase in the metabolite concentrations when measured with a 6-ms TE (N-acetyl-aspartate, 12%, P=.002; creatine, 15%, P=.04; and glutamate+glutamine, 92%, P=.02) compared to concentrations measured with data collected at TEs of 15 and 20 ms.

Increasing the speed of relaxometry-based compartmental analysis experiments in STEAM spectroscopy.

In this work we present a method for improving the speed of spin-spin relaxation time (T2) measurements for compartmental analysis in stimulated echo localized magnetic resonance spectroscopy without reducing the sampling density. The technique uses a progressive repetition time (TR) to compensate for echo time (TE) dependent variations in saturation effects that would otherwise modulate the received signal at short TRs. The method was validated in T2 studies on 10 young healthy subjects in spectroscopic voxels localized along either the right or left Sylvian fissure (2 x 2 x 1.5 cm3, 10 ms mixing time (TM), 2048 data points, 819.2 ms acquisition time). The TR was automatically adjusted so that TR-TM-TE/2 was kept constant as the TE was incremented. Compared to long TR T2 experiments, the progressive TR technique consistently replicated the T2 relaxation times and reference signals of the tissue water compartment while reducing the data acquisition time by more than 50%. The percent error was on average less than 2% for estimates of T2 and S(0) for the tissue water, an indication that the progressive TR technique is a useful method for determining the tissue water signal for internal referencing.