Abstract #0406

Non-Water Suppressed Proton MR Spectroscopy Allows Spectral Quality Improvement in the Human Cervical Spinal Cord

Andreas Hock¹, Erin Leigh MacMillan², Alexander Fuchs¹, Roland Kreis², Peter Boesiger¹, Spyros Kollias³, Anke Henning¹

¹Institute for Biomedical Engineering, University & ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; ²Dept. of Clinical Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland; ³University Hospital of Zurich, Institute of Neuroradiology, Zurich, Switzerland

1H non-water-suppressed MR spectroscopy with the metabolite cycling technique is introduced for measurements in the spinal cord. The high SNR of the water peak allows frequency alignment of FIDs before signal averaging to improve the spectral quality (line shape and SNR) of the metabolite peaks. A study on 3 volunteers demonstrates the feasibility of the method and results in a higher SNR for metabolite cycled spectra as compared with VAPOR water suppressed acquisitions: (mean SD) 6.3 0.6, and 4.7 0.6, respectively.