Abstract #0889

Schr M, Henning A, Kollias S, Meier D, Boesiger P, Dydak U

Spinal cord MRS has been mainly restricted to the brain-stem and the upper part of the cervical spine. In this work first MRS patient data from the thoracic spinal cord are shown. Furthermore the spectral quality as well as its consistency over different volunteers and patients in the cervical spine was improved. Both was possible due to a combination of outer-volume suppression bands with a very sharp excitation profile, based on quadratic-phase (QPP) and higher-order-phase (HOPP) saturation pulses, and localized higher-order shimming, based on high-resolution cardiac-triggered B0-mapping.