Broad-line quantitative chemical-shift spectroscopy

This paper develops a proton MR spectroscopic technique for the quantitative measurement of total body water/fat distributions in vivo. A special MR protocol was developed to excite a thick slab of tissue and display the power MR spectrum of the collected response signal. Very short TE (10 msec) and long TR (3,000 msec) were used to avoid any relaxation damping of the signal intensities. The spectrum was then decomposed into individual lines, and the proton densities of different species were calculated. Proton density information was converted into weight percentage data using stoichiometric and physiologic information