Comparison of 31P-MRS at 3T & 7T for Localized & Non-Localized Acquisition

Wolfgang Bogner¹, Marek Chmelik¹, Siegfried Trattnig¹, Stephan Gruber¹

For phosphorus magnetic resonance spectroscopy (31P-MRS) the SNR of surface coil localized fully relaxed 31P spectra was reported to be almost doubled between 3T vs 7T in the human calf muscle. These studies did not consider differences in the sensitive volume of coils. Localized 31P-MRS allows unbiased comparison of spectral quality between different field strength. We found that the reported SNR gain for surface coil localized 31P-MRS was significantly underestimated. In our study localized 31P-MRS showed an ~3.2 times higher SNR at 7T than at 3T with identical measurement parameters, while surface coil localized 31P-MRS showed only an increase by a factor of ~2.