Quantitative short echo-time 1H LASER-CSI in human brain at 4 T

A novel short echo-time 1 H chemical shift imaging (CSI) pulse sequence is presented that incorporates localization by adiabatic selective refocusing (LASER) for FOV-reduction, k-space weighted averaging and macromolecule subtraction, to obtain quantitative concentration measurements of N-acetyl-aspartate, glutamate, glucose, myo-inositol, creatine and choline using a nominal voxel size of 0.56cm 3 . A comparison of spectral quality and metabolite concentration measurements was made between LASER-CSI and LASER-single voxel spectroscopy (SVS) in a region of homogeneous parietal white matter (N ¼8). No significant differences were found in linewidths, signal-to-noise ratios or the effectiveness of the macromolecule subtraction between SVS and CSI. Water suppression was 45% more effective in SVS than in CSI (p