Jimin Ren1,2, A. Dean Sherry1,3, Craig R. Malloy1,4
1Advanced Imaging Research Center, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA; 2Department of Radiology, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center; 3Department of Chemistry, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA; 4VA North Texas Health Care System
Proton MRS enables resolution of intra- from extra-myocellular lipids (IMCL and EMCL) in skeletal muscle. However, in a conventional muscle proton MR spectrum acquired at short echo time (TE) is often featured with severe overlapping EMCL and IMCL signal, which requires fitting procedures to separate these two components, even for spectra collected on ultra-high field scanner at 7 Tesla. This post-processing, unfortunately, is cumbersome. The current study evaluated a long TE scheme without water suppression for soleus and gastrocnemius muscles of 20 healthy human subjects, all with significantly improved chemical shift resolution. The mechanism of resultion enhancement was also discussed.