Proton MR Spectroscopy Using Short TE PRESS Without Water Suppression. in Vivo Application to Rat Brain at 7 Tesla

Wolfgang Dreher^1,2, Ekkehard Kstermann^1,2, Dieter Leibfritz^1,2

It is shown that water suppression is not required to measure high quality proton spectra of the rat brain in vivo using an optimized short TE (TE=10 ms) PRESS sequence on a modern 7 Tesla animal scanner. Remaining gradient induced sideband signals are avoided by adding online two data sets acquired with opposite gradient directions and opposite offset frequencies. Data analysis is either performed without separating water and metabolite signals or after automatic water elimination in the time domain, e.g. by using the matrix pencil method. The presented study is another step to make water suppression obsolete for proton MRS.