Changho Choi1,
Aditya Patel1, Deborah Douglas1, Ivan Dimitrov1,2
1Advanced Imaging Research Center,
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, United States; 2Philips
Medical Systems, Cleveland, OH, United States
Measurement
of the transverse relaxation times of brain metabolites including
coupled-spin metabolites such as glutamate (Glu) and myo-inositol (mIns) in
gray and white matter, at 3T, is reported. Four pairs of PRESS (point
resolved spectroscopy) subecho times, which were obtained with numerical
analyses of the sequence for optimal selectivity of Glu and mIns, were used
for T2 measurement. Single-voxel measurements were carried out on the
gray-matter (GM) and white-matter (WM) dominant regions in the occipital lobe
of five healthy adult brains. The Glu T2 was measured to be similar between
GM and WM (16118 and 16922 ms, respectively). Myo-inositol, creatine, and
choline also exhibited similar T2 between GM and WM, but the T2 of
N-acetylaspartate (2.01 ppm) was significantly different between GM and WM
(26216 and 32621 ms, respectively), with p = 0.001.