Several studies have reported strong correlations between transverse relaxation rate (R2) of the brain metabolites and neurological/psychiatric diseases. Typically, R2 quantification requires several PRESS acquisitions at different echo-times leading to long scan times. Here, we evaluated the feasibility of a novel technique based on a single-echo PRESS acquisition with full echo sampling for R2 estimation of major brain metabolites (NAA, Cr and Cho) and compared those to the values obtained using five PRESS acquisitions. The proposed method allowed for R2 estimation with 87.7±6.8% accuracy compared to the multiple PRESS acquisitions representing a five-fold decrease in acquisition time in this case.
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