Quantitation of metabolites by 1H NMR

In this report we describe the three factors that need to be measured when quantitating an edited resonance relative to an internal standard using a surface coil. These factors are necessary by virtue of the water, fat suppressing, and localization schemes used in studing a 1H metabolite. First, use of semi-selective pulses requires amplitude correction of the edited and reference resonances. Second, use of a single surface coil results in different sensitive volumes for different resonances due to the inhomogeneous B1 and therefore require separate acquisition of the resonances. Third, editing pulses alter the sensitive volumes and this correction must be made internally by applying the same editing pulse to the reference resonance. A rationalization of this correction is given in terms of rotation operators. We apply these corrections to quantitate edited lactate relative to total creatine in a MnCl2-doped phantom and find 91% rather than 145% of known concentration. In human skeletal muscle in vivo after exhaustive exercise, we measured the lactate after exercise and found it to be 27.2 mM in two experiments, in reasonable agreement with literature values for the given exercise protocol.