Sensitivity-encoded spectroscopic imaging

Sensitivity encoding (SENSE) offers a new, highly effective approach to red ucing the acquisition time In spectroscopic imaging (SI). In contrast to co nventional fast SI techniques, which accelerate-k-space sampling, this meth od permits reducing the number of phase encoding steps in each phase encodi ng dimension of conventional SI. Using a coil array for data acquisition, t he missing encoding information is recovered exploiting knowledge of the di stinct spatial sensitivities of the individual coil elements. In this work, SENSE is applied to 2D spectroscopic imaging. Fourfold reduction of scan t ime is achieved at preserved spectral and spatial resolution, maintaining a reasonable SNR. The basic properties of the proposed method are demonstrat ed by phantom experiments. The in vivo feasibility of SENSE-SI is verified by metabolic Imaging of N-acetylaspartate, creatine, and choline in the hum an brain. These results are compared to conventional SI, with special atten tion to the spatial response and the SNR. (C) 2001 Wiley-Liss, Inc.