Contamination-Free Measurement of GABA in the Human Brain by Optimized PRESS at 7.0 T in vivo

Changho Choi¹, Abhishek Banerjee¹, Sandeep Ganji¹, Ivan Dimitrov¹, Subroto Ghose¹, Carol Tamminga¹

A comparison study of GABA measurement by optimized PRESS and difference editing (MEGA) at 7 T is presented. The PRESS TE was optimized as 92 ms for detection of the GABA 2.28 ppm resonance. MEGA was used to edit the 3.0 ppm resonance with TE = 70 ms. Data were acquired from the medial occipital cortex in 5 healthy volunteers. The GABA levels estimated with PRESS and MEGA were 0.800.06 and 1.150.16 mM (meanSD, n=5) with reference to creatine at 8 mM, respectively. The GABA measures by PRESS and MEGA are discussed, focusing on contaminations from macromolecules and homocarnosine.