Sandro
Romanzetti1, Eberhard D. Pracht1, N. Jon Shah1,2
1Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine
4, Medical Imaging Physics, Forschungszentrum Juelich, Juelich, Germany; 2Faculty
of Medicine, Department of Neurology, RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany
Imaging
of nuclei such as 23Na, 31P, and 17O is
becoming very important to understand the physiology of the cell. However,
due to the low concentration and short relaxation times of theses nuclei in
tissues, dedicated sequences and high optimisation are required. The SPRITE
sequence has shown its ability to image the sodium in the in vivo human brain at ultrashort
encoding times. In this work, a novel way to improve the sensitivity of the
standard SPRITE sequence by a factor 2 is presented. This is of particular
relevance for all applications where the SNR is very low.
Keywords