In vivo 1H-MR spectroscopy of the human heart

Combined respiratory and cardiac triggering improves the localization accuracy and spectral quality in cardiac1H-MRS dramatically leading to substantially increased spectral reproducibility. The best practical realization of double triggering turned out to be the use of the ECG amplitude when making use of the fact that it is modulated by respiration. In spite of the spectral quality achieved in most subjects, we still fail to record satisfactory spectra in a minority of subjects. The reasons for this are not understood at present but must be some particulars of either a given subject or the experimental setup. The cardiac1H-MR spectra contain quantifiable contributions from creatine, TMA, lipids, and probably taurine. It is possible that the spectral contributions of creatine are subject to dipolar coupling similar to the observations for skeletal muscle.