In-phase simultaneous spectral editing of lactate and alanine with suppression of J-coupled lipids by the modified selective multiple quantum coherence sequences.

H magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) with the multiple quantum coherence (MQC) technique allows for the detection of lactate, an end product of glycolysis, in the environment of lipids. The method can also be used to detect alanine, a byproduct of glutaminolysis. An issue is that when both lactate and alanine are detected together by the MQC technique, a phase mismatch arises between lactate and alanine signals due to off-resonance rotations and the difference in double quantum coherence frequencies between the two molecules. Such phase mismatch can cause errors in spectral fitting and metabolite quantification. In this study, we designed two pulse sequences that eliminate such phase differences of lactate and alanine while suppressing lipid signals by modifications of the Selective Multiple Quantum Coherence (Sel-MQC) sequence, a well-known MQC technique. Using the product operator formalism and the off-resonance rotation matrices, the phase evolutions of lactate and alanine during the spectrally selective pulses and the free precession times of the sequence at the single quantum, double quantum and zero quantum coherence states of these molecules were calculated. The multiple quantum (MQ) evolution time t that can remove the phase difference of lactate and alanine at the echo was calculated and fine-tuned with experiments. The lactate and alanine signal intensities and the editing efficiencies from the two modified Sel-MQC sequences were theoretically predicted by using the product operator evolutions and compared with the experimental data. The J-coupled lipid signals were successfully suppressed by both sequences. One of the two developed sequences was applied to a human body with a phantom of lactate and alanine, which resulted in successful in-phase editing of lactate and alanine and suppression of the lipid signals from the body. The study sets an important foundation for the noninvasive detection of lactate and alanine from tumors of cancer patients.