In vivo GABA T2 determination with J-refocused echo time extension at 7 T

A method to measure the T2 relaxation time of GABA with spectral editing techniques is proposed. Spectral editing techniques can be used to unambiguously extract signals of low concentration J-coupled spins such as γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) from overlapping resonances such as creatine and macromolecules. These sequences, however, generally have fixed and relatively long echo times. Therefore, for the absolute quantification of the edited spectrum, the T2 relaxation time must be taken into account. To measure the T2 relaxation time, the signal intensity has to be obtained at multiple echo times. However, on a coupled spin system such as GABA this is challenging, since the signal intensity of the target resonances is modulated not only by T2 decay but also by the J-coupling, which strongly influences the shapes and amplitudes of the edited signals, depending on the echo time. Here, we propose to refocus the J-modulation of the edited signal at different echo times by using chemical shift selective refocusing. In this way the echo time can be arbitrarily extended while preserving the shape of the edited signal. The method was applied in combination with the MEGA-sLASER editing technique to measure the in vivo T2 relaxation time of GABA (87 ± 11 ms, n = 10) and creatine (109 ± 8 ms, n = 10) at 7 T. The T1 relaxation time of these metabolites in a single subject was also determined (GABA, 1334 ± 158 ms; Cr, 1753 ± 12 ms). The T2 decay curve of coupled spin systems can be sampled in an arbitrary fashion without the need for signal shape correction. Furthermore, the method can be applied with any spectral editing technique. The shortest echo time of the method is limited by the echo time of the spectral editing technique.