Detection of Glutamate and Glutamine by RF Suppression and TE Optimization at 7T

Li An¹, Shizhe Li¹, James B. Murdoch², Jun Shen¹

Recently, Choi et al. proposed to use a TE optimized PRESS method at 7T to resolve glutamate and glutamine, taking advantage of the chemical shift offset artifact to suppress overlapping signals from the aspartyl moiety of NAA. In this work, we propose to suppress spectral interference from the aspartyl moiety of NAA by a selective RF pulse placed at the resonance frequnecy of the NAA aspartyl CH proton at 4.38 ppm, which alters the J-evolution of the NAA aspartyl CH2 multiplet at 2.5 ppm. The flip angle of this suppression pulse along with the sub-TEs are optimized for the detection of Gln and Glu.