Sai K. Merugumala1,
James A. Balschi2, Hui Jun Liao1, Alexander Lin1
1Center
for Clinical Spectroscopy, Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's
Hospital, Boston, MA, United States; 2Physiological NMR Core
Laboratory, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA,
United States
In vivo 31P MR spectra of skeletal muscle were obtained during an exercise protocol. A standard post processing method was compared with a method utilizing exercise time domain filtering with Spectral Improvement by Fourier Thresholding (SIFT) . S/N and time constants of Phosphocreatine (PCr) recovery are calculated after each method and then compared. Using the SIFT method showed substantial increase in S/N and the physiologically relevant time constants were calculated with narrower confidence intervals. This method could potentially be used to more reliably detect differences in in skeletal muscle mitochondrial functionality that effect the PCr recovery time constants.