Proton MR spectroscopic imaging without water suppression

To improve reproducibility in proton magnetic resonance (MR) spectroscopic imaging in human brain, simultaneous acquisition of the internal water reference and metabolite signals was evaluated. Measurements in healthy volunteers showed that the increase in dynamic range from signal oversampling was sufficient to avoid digitization errors. In addition, use of singular value decomposition techniques and finite impulse response filters proved effective in separating water and metabolite signals and providing estimates of the metabolite concentrations.