Reproducibility of neurochemical profile quantification in pregenual cingulate,anterior midcingulate,and bilateral posterior insular subdivisions measured at 3 tesla

The current report assessed measurement reproducibility of proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy at 3 tesla in the left and right posterior insular,pregenual anterior cingulate,and anterior midcingulate cortices. ten healthy male volunteers aged 21-30 years were tested at four different days,of which nine were included in the data analysis. intra- and inter-subject variability of myo-inositol,creatine,glutamate,total-choline,total-n-acetylaspartate,and combined glutamine-glutamate were calculated considering the influence of movement parameters,age,daytime of measurements,and tissue composition. overall mean intra-/inter-subject variability for all neurochemicals combined revealed small mean coefficients of variation across the four regions: 5.3/9.05% in anterior midcingulate,6.6/8.84% in pregenual anterior cingulate,7.3/10.00% in left posterior and 8.2/10.55% in right posterior insula. head movement,tissue composition and day time revealed no significant explanatory variance contribution suggesting a negligible influence on the data. a strong correlation between cramer-rao lower bounds (a measure of fitting errors) and the mean intra-subject coefficients of variation (r = 0.799,p < 0.001) outlined the importance of low fitting errors in order to obtain robust and finally meaningful measurements. the present findings confirm proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy as a reliable tool to measure brain neurochemistry in small subregions of the human brain. © 2016 de matos,meier,wyss,meier,gutzeit,ettlin and brügger.