Incorporating homonuclear polarization transfer into PRESS for proton spectral editing: Illustration with lactate and glutathione

A proton spectral editing pulse sequence for the detection of metabolites with spin systems that involve weak coupling is presented. The sequence is based on homonuclear polarization transfer incorporated into the standard PRESS (Point RESolved Spectroscopy) sequence, which is a volume-selective double spin echo method, to enable spatial localization. All peaks in the region of interest are initially suppressed whether they are peaks from the target metabolite or from contaminating background. The target signal is then restored by polarization transfer from a proton that has a resonance outside the suppressed region and to which the target spins are weakly coupled. This is achieved by the application of a 90° hard pulse with phase orthogonal to that of the PRESS excitation pulse at the location of the first echo in PRESS and by optimizing the two PRESS timings, TE1 and TE2, for most efficient yield. Background signal not coupled to any protons outside the initially saturated region remains suppressed. The advantage of this sequence compared to multiple quantum filters is that signal from singlet peaks outside the suppressed area are preserved and can thus be used as a reference. The efficacy of the sequence was verified experimentally on phantom solutions of lactate and glutathione at 3.0 T. For the AX3 spin system of lactate, the sequence timings were optimized by product operator calculations whereas for the ABX spin system of the cysteinyl group of glutathione numerical calculations were performed for sequence timing optimization.