Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopic Quantitation: a Review of Modern time-domain Analysis Methods

Nuclear) Magnetic Resonance ((N)MR) is a non-invasive technique that has been used to acquire spatially resolved images of living organisms and to monitor changes in the metabolism. An application of clinical MR is MR spectroscopy (MRS) in which chemical information can be obtained from a well-defined region in for example the human brain. The parameters of the MRS signal provide direct information about the molecules of the organism under investigation: the frequency of the spectral components characterizes the identity of the molecules, the damping characterizes the mobility of the molecules and the intensity (amplitude) is directly proportional to the number of molecules. Accurate quantification of MRS signals is the essential step prior to the conversion of the estimated signal parameters into biochemical quantities (e.g. concentration, pH). In this paper an overview of modern analysis methods is given