Abstract #3005

Valette J, Bataille H, Hantraye P, Lebon V

A highly selective excitation method was designed in order to limit extra-voxel contamination on short TE 1H spectra of the frontal lobe at 3 Tesla. The method relies on the combination of two Shinnar-LeRoux (SLR) pulses: a 1.5ms 90 SLR pulse preceded by optimized saturation SLR pulses. As a result, a very sharp selection was obtained, characterized by negligible transition bandwidth and outer-ripples. The SLR excitation method proved efficient for short echo time STEAM spectroscopy of the human frontal lobe: artifact-free spectra were obtained in the 3.5-4.5ppm range, in contrast to spectra localized with sinc3 pulses.