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A two-dimensional (2D) chemical shift correlated MR spectroscopic (COSY) sequence integrated into a new volume localization technique (90°-180°-90°) is proposed for whole-body MR spectroscopy (MRS).Due to the recent improvements in the design of B 0 gradient and RF coils, 1 H MR spectra have been recorded in human brain with excellent water suppression using short TE, as short as 15 ms, and several cerebral metabolites have been identified (1-4). During the past decade alterations in several metabolites, namely, N-acetylaspartate (NAA), glutamate/glutamine (Glx), choline (Ch), creatine (Cr), myo-inositol (mI), and ␥-aminobutyrate (GABA) have been reported in different pathologic states involving the central nervous system (CNS) (5-10). Absolute quantitation of cerebral metabolites in vivo has also been reported for only a few metabolites, albeit with limited success (11-13). Due to severe overlap of these metabolites, an unambiguous assignment of J-coupled metabolite multiplets is severely hindered at 1.5 T field strength.One-dimensional (1D) MR spectral editing techniques to unravel the overlapping resonances rely on J-coupled proton metabolites that have well-separated multiplets. A technique based on subtraction methodology is very sensitive to motion artifacts leading to subtraction errors. An additional drawback is that only one metabolite can be identified at a time. Successful attempts in editing GABA and glutamate using whole-body MRI/MRS scanners have been presented by other researchers (13,14). Single-shotbased multiple-quantum filtered MR spectroscopic sequences have also been implemented on whole-body scanners, but a severe signal loss associated with various coherence transfer pathways made it less attractive to human applications (15)(16)(17).A localized version of a two-dimensional (2D) J-resolved MR spectroscopic (JPRESS) sequence using the PRESS sequence for volume localization was recently proposed (18 -20). Even though the JPRESS sequence retains 100% of the magnetization from a localized volume of interest (VOI), the strong coupling effect inherent at 1.5 T field strength resulted in a complex 2D cross-peak pattern for NAA, glutamate/glutamine, GABA, and other cerebral metabolites (19). Also, some of the 2D cross-peaks were heavily T 2 -weighted during the long incremental delays necessitated by the second dimension of the JPRESS spectrum. An oversampled J-resolved sequence has also been proposed recently (21).Compared to the 2D J-resolved spectra, a COSY spectrum produces a better dispersion of J-cross-peaks, although it requires a larger spectral window to be sampled during the evolution period (22). Different versions of the localized COSY sequence have been implemented by other researchers (23-33). McKinnon and Bosiger (23) proposed a conventional COSY sequence with hard RF pulses (90°-t 1 -90°) followed by three volume selective 180°RF pulses. Haase et al. (24) implemented a COSY combined with an outer volume suppressing sequence, namely, LOCUS. Many previous attempts to develop localiz...

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