INS-PRESS for Functional MRS: Simultaneous With- And Without-Water Suppression Spectral Acquisition on Visual Cortex of Human Brains at 3T

¹Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; ²Graduate Institute of Biomedical Electronics and Bioinformatics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; ³Magnetic Resonance Development and Application Center, University Hospital Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany; ⁴Department of Automatic Control Engineering, Feng-Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan

Interleaved navigator scan (INS) PRESS was used to acquire functional spectra with water suppression, with the non-water-suppressed navigator signal obtain within one single TR. This technique was employed for fMRS of visual stimulation at 3T to analyze the BOLD effects of water and metabolite concentration changes simultaneously. The metabolites, such as NAA, mI, choline, and creatine, can be stably detected (CRLB<10%) after 32 scan averages, some of which correlated with the brain activation pattern (about 2% increment). In addition, the water peak showed consistent change in magnitude, linewidth, and integral value in the primary visual cortex during photic stimulation.