TE-Averaged PRESS for Breast Spectroscopy - Increased Flexibility by using Fractional NEX Averaging

Ralph Noeske¹, Timo Schirmer²

MR Spectroscopy (MRS) is used as a clinical tool in diagnosing and characterizing breast cancer. TE-averaged PRESS is a common technique for single voxel breast spectroscopy (SVS) to remove potential sideband artifacts due to oscillations of the B0 field during the beginning of the acquisition. This study will present an acquisition scheme where the number of acquisitions per echo time (averages) varies across the bandwidth of acquired echo times. This fractional NEX (number of excitations) averaging method gives increased flexibility to adapt acquisition time to lesion size with only negligible effect on sideband artifacts.