Optimized Spectroscopic RARE at 7 Tesla Applied to Rat Brain in Vivo

Wolfgang Dreher¹, Dieter Leibfritz¹

The fast spectroscopic imaging method spectroscopic RARE was implemented on a 7-Tesla animal scanner and applied to rat brain in vivo. It is shown that various experimental problems occurring at higher B₀ can be eliminated and, compared to earlier results at 4.7 T, the potential of a higher signal-to-noise ratio and increased spectral resolution can be exploited. As increased spectral resolution requires a larger number of k_Ω -encoding steps and thus a longer minimum total measurement time, the use of phase corrected spectra calculated from asymmetric k_Ω -sampling is considered as an alternative to magnitude spectra calculated from symmetrically sampled k_Ω -data.