A highly sensitive lactate editing technique for surface coil spectroscopic imaging in vivo

A lactate editing sequence based on the use of spin-locking pulses with surface coils is described. The sequence retains more than 90% of the available lactate magnetization and suppresses at least 95% of the lipid signal in a single scan and ca. 99.5% after a simple two step cycle. The technique allows simultaneous observation of lactate and uncoupled metabolites in the range 2 to 3 ppm. The sequence was combined with two-dimensional spectroscopic imaging to obtain a lactate map of an ischemic rat brain in vivo.