MEGA-PRESSing Onward for More Metabolites: Aspartate, Lactate, and PE

James B. Murdoch¹, Andrew J. Wheaton¹, Robert Anderson¹

With a change in the edit-ON selective inversion frequency to 3.89 ppm, the TE 80 MEGA-PRESS sequence favored for GABA editing can be used to highlight aspartate as well. Inverting the aspartate CH proton on half the acquisitions and taking the difference between edit-ON and edit-OFF shots yields a peak at 2.74 ppm from J-coupled aspartate CH2 spins. Other metabolites of interest with J-coupled resonances near 3.89 ppm are co-edited including lactate and phosphorylethanolamine (PE). Posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) spectra from a normal volunteer were phase and frequency aligned on a shot-by-shot basis and processed with LCModel.