| Abstract: | MRS techniques can aide in confirming the location of seizure foci in temporal lobe epilepsy. N-acetyl aspartate (NAA). creatine plus phosphocreatine. choline-containing compounds, and lactate arc most often the clinically relevant metabolites in these studies. We examined the importance of partial volume effects from tissue heterogeneity in temporal lobe spectroscopy on the metabolite ratios. Our study shows that localized spectroscopy, using three different voxel slzes. centered on the anterior body of the hippocampus. produces significantly different values for the NAA to the creatine ratio. The spectroscopy was performed at 1.5 T wing the PRESS pulse sequence and a phased-array coil system specifically designed for the temporal lobe. The data exhibits a clear trend of increasing NM to creatine ratios with increasing voxel size. This trend demonstrates that partial volume effects can contribute to variation of NAA to creatine ratios in healthy subjects. |
