Sarah Andrea Wijtenburg1,2, Jack Knight-Scott1
1Radiology, Children's
Healthcare of Atlanta, Atlanta, GA, United States; 2Biomedical
Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, United States
In this work, we examine the capability of a very short TE phase rotation STEAM (PR-STEAM) to detect glutamate. Spectrosopic data were acquired from the anterior cingulate gyrus using 6.5-ms TE PR-STEAM, 40-ms TE PRESS, 72-ms TE STEAM, and TE-Averaging with an effective TE of 105-ms on a clinical 3-T MRI system. The 6.5-ms TE PR-STEAM identified glutamate with the greatest precision (CV of 7.1%), followed by TE-Averaging (CV of 8.9%), 40-ms TE PRESS (CV of 11.9%), and 72-ms TE STEAM (CV of 13.8%). Thus, glutamate is best detected in the human brain at 3-T using very short TEs.