Short TE in vivo H-1 MR spectroscopic imaging at 1.5 T: acquisition and automated spectral analysis

Spectral analysis of short TE in vivo proton magnetic resonance spectroscop ic imaging (MRSI) data are complicated by the presence of spectral overlap, low signal to noise and uncharacterized signal contributions. In this stud y, it is shown that an automated data analysis method can be used tn genera te metabolite images from MRSI data obtained from human brain at TE = 25 ms and 1.5 T when optimized pulse sequences and a priori metabolite knowledge are used. The analysis approach made use of computer simulation methods to obtain a priori spectral information of the metabolites of interest and ut ilized a combination of parametric spectral modeling and non-parametric sig nal characterization for baseline fitting. This approach was applied to dat a from optimized PRESS-SI and multi-slice spin-echo SI acquisitions, for wh ich sample spectra and metabolite images are shown. (C) 2000 Elsevier Scien ce Inc. All rights reserved.