OPTIMIZING SPATIALLY LOCALIZED NMR

Fourier-series windowing, a technique used to obtain spatially localiz ed in vivo NMR spectra, is extended to fields-of-view containing a num ber of arbitrarily shaped regions of interest. For each volume, k-spac e weighting functions are derived and then combined to give an overall k-space sampling pattern - the number of signal acquisitions per phas e-encoding vector - which can then be used to obtain spatially localiz ed spectra of optimal sensitivity, consistent with a specified degree of localization. The technique is compared with the related methods of chemical-shift imaging and spectral localization by imaging. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.