Skewed adiabatic pulses for outer volume suppression in single voxel spectroscopy

Commonly, the product spectroscopic sequences available on commercial scanners don’t take full advantage of the scanner hardware. At an intermediate, now widely available field of 3T, issues like chemical shift displacement and contamination by external lipids become a problem, especially because of the low γB1 and the slow prescribed gradients. In this context, detection of metabolites at low concentrations and with chemical shift near large lipid resonances (e.g. like lactate) is critical. Here we adopted an OVS suppression based on skewed asymmetric adiabatic pulses [Hwang1999], along with high performance dephasing gradients, in order to examine to what extent a substantial decrease of voxel signal contamination can be obtained on clinical scanners, without compromising water suppression efficiency.