Localized MR-Spectroscopy in Arbitrarily Shaped Voxels using Parallel Excitation Pulses with Large Spectral Bandwidth

Peter Ullmann¹, Jeff Snyder², Martin Haas², Johannes Thomas Schneider^1,2, Wolfgang Ruhm¹

Spatially-selective excitation (SSE) offers great potential for volume-selective MR-spectroscopy by allowing the excitation of arbitrarily shaped voxels which can be used to mitigate partial-volume effects and to increase SNR. In order to excite arbitrary voxels with high spatial resolution and large spectral bandwidth this study combines segmented SSE pulses with parallel RF transmission which enables significant reduction of the number of segments. Experiments on a 9.4T animal scanner demonstrate that by using segmented parallel excitation pulses complex-shaped voxels can be excited with good spatial selectivity and spectra with broad spectral range and high resolution can be acquired from these voxels.