High-resolution two-dimensional ¹H J-resolved MRS measurements on in vivo samples

Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) provides a noninvasive tool for metabolite characterization of in vivo biological samples. Conventional MRS measurements on biological samples generally suffer from field inhomogeneity caused by intrinsic magnetic susceptibility variations inside samples. Compared to one-dimensional MRS, two-dimensional (2D) J-resolved spectroscopy enables resolving J couplings along one of the spectral dimension and benefits to metabolite identification and analyses. Intermolecular double-quantum coherences (iDQC) has been proven to be insensitive to magnetic field inhomogeneity, herein we propose a MRS approach based on iDQC evolution and optimal echo sampling scheme to achieve high-resolution 2D J-resolved measurements on biological samples. The applicability of the proposed method is evaluated with experiments on an ex vivo pig brain tissue and an in vivo rat brain tissue. Compared to conventional MRS method which is sensitive to field inhomogeneity inside investigated biological tissues, the proposed method holds immunity to this field inhomogeneity and the quality of resulting spectra may not be influenced by localized voxel size variation. The signal to noise ratio enhancement of the proposed method benefitting from the optimal echo signal sampling is verified with a solution experiment. The new method provides a promising way for high-resolution MRS measurements on biological samples. In combination with fast acquisition strategy, it may find some promising biomedical applications.