In Vivo Detection of Lactate and its T2 in the Resting Human Brain by Transverse Relaxation Encoding with Narrowband Decoupling

Motivation: The published T2 relaxation times in healthy brains are highly inconsistent. Goal(s): To reliably measure T2 relaxation times of lactate and glutamate. Approach: A new editing pulse was crafted and incorporated into the TREND technique for simultaneous homonuclear decoupling of lactate and glutamate at 7 Tesla. Results: The concentrations and T2 relaxation times of lactate and glutamate were measured in vivo with low CVs and CRLBs. Impact: As lactate and glutamate are the markers of glycolysis and oxidative metabolism, respectively, this technique can be used for clinical MRS studies of the biophysical aspects of cerebral metabolic alterations or abnormalities.