MR Spectrocopy of Arbitrarily Shaped Single Voxel Using Segmented, Blipped-Planar 2D-Selective RF Excitations with Weighted Averaging

Jrgen Finsterbusch^1,2, Martin G. Busch^1,2

The target regions of MR spectroscopy usually deviate from the cuboid volume defined with cross-sectional RF excitations yielding partial volume effects (reduced coverage of the target volume and/or signal contributions from surrounding tissue). The capability of 2D-selective RF excitations to excite an arbitrarily shaped regions-of-interest reduces the partial volume effects. Here, weighted averaging combined with a flip adaptation is used to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) efficiency of an approach using 2DRF based on a blipped-planar trajectory. For the example profile with the shape of a corpus callosum, the SNR could be increased by a factor of about 3.