Abstract #2923

Detection of acetyl-carnitine in the human heart in vivo using long echo-time 1H-MRS at 3T

Joe Pollacco^1,2, William Clarke³, Aaron Hess¹, Dragana Savic^1,4, Christopher T Rodgers^1,5, Damian Tyler^1,4, Jack JJ Miller^1,2,4, and Ladislav Valkovic^1,6

¹Oxford Centre for Clinical Magnetic Resonance Research, RDM Cardiovascular Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, ²Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, ³Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, ⁴Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, ⁵Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, ⁶Department of Imaging Methods, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia

Cardiac acetyl-carnitine plays an important role in fat metabolism. Decreased carnitine concentration has been reported in heart failure, but it has previously been difficult to measure acetyl-carnitine in-vivo. We show for the first time that it is possible to detect a clear acetyl-carnitine resonance at δ=2.1ppm without lipid contamination within the heart using a long echo time semi-LASER sequence at 3T. This validates the finding in skeletal muscle that the T₂ of acetyl-carnitine is much longer than its surrounding lipid signals. Further work is underway to investigate variability of the acetyl-carnitine signal postprandially.

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