In vivo solvent-suppressed localized hydrogen nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy: a window to metabolism?

Solvent-suppression NMR techniques are combined with a pulsed magnetic field gradient and surface coil detection method of spatial localization. The result is a technique that enables observation of metabolites in the hydrogen (1H) NMR chemical-shift spectra from preselected disk-shaped volumes of biological tissue in vivo. Localized spectra are recorded from the normal human brain and forearm and from a dog in acquisition periods of 2 s using a 1.5-T imaging/spectroscopy system. This is several hundred-fold faster than acquiring similar state-of-the-art 31P NMR spectra of brain metabolites in vivo. Spectroscopy experiments are followed by conventional surface coil imaging sequences to precisely define the selected volume. Contamination of spectra by lipid resonances is a problem.