Broadband decoupled, 1 H‐localized 13 C MRS of the human brain at 4 tesla

Broadband proton decoupling of the entire 13 C spectrum was possible within power absorption guidelines and resulted in the detection of narrow (as low as 2–3 Hz), natural abundance signals from metabolites such as myo ‐inositol, glutamate, N ‐acetyl‐aspartate, and glutamine from 72 cm 3 volumes in the human brain. To overcome the chemical shift displacement error, three‐dimensional localization on the 1 H z magnetization was combined with polarization transfer. Efficiency of the heteronuclear localization method was demonstrated by the elimination of all scalp lipid resonances. A signal‐to‐noise ratio of 5:1 for 0.07 m M [ 13 C] was achieved in 12 min, which is approximately a fivefold improvement over the sensitivity reported at 2.1 Tesla.