{"doi":"10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00813","title":"Feasibility of Measuring GABA Levels in the Upper Brainstem in Healthy Volunteers Using Edited MRS","abstract":"Purpose: To assess the feasibility of small-voxel MEGA-PRESS in detecting gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) levels of the upper brainstem in healthy volunteers. Materials and Methods: Forty-two healthy volunteers, aged between 20 and 76 years were enrolled in this study, and underwent a 3.0T MRI scan using an eight-channel phased-array head coil. The MEGA-PRESS sequence was used to edit GABA signal from a 10x25x30 mm3 voxel in the upper brain stem. The detected signal includes contributions from macromolecules (MM) and homocarnosine and is therefore referred to as GABA+. All the data were processed using Gannet. Results: Thirty-four cases were successful in measuring GABA in the upper brainstem and 8 cases failed (based on poor modeling of spectra). The GABA+ levels were 2.66±0.75 i .u. in the upper brainstem of healthy volunteers, ranging from 1.50 to 4.40 i .u.. The normalized fitting residual (FitErr in Gannet) was 12.1±2.8 %, ranging from 7.4% to 19.1%; it was below 15.5% in 30 cases (71%). Conclusions: It is possible to measure GABA levels in the upper brainstem using MEGA-PRESS with a relatively small ROI, with a moderate between-subject variance of under 30%.","journal":"Frontiers in Psychiatry","year":2020,"id":111213,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":5,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.8045,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":417906,"name":"Tao Gong","orcid":"0000-0001-9689-0420","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":238015,"name":"Richard A.E. Edden","orcid":"0000-0002-0671-7374","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":417911,"name":"Guangbin Wang","orcid":"0000-0001-7410-5540","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":417910,"name":"Yulu Song","orcid":"0000-0002-4416-7959","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":51,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:13:05.597252Z","pmid":"32922319","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}