NMF in MR spectroscopy

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016. All rights reserved. Nowadays, magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) represents a powerful nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technique in oncology since it provides information on the biochemical profile of tissues, thereby allowing clinicians and radiologists to identify in a non-invasive way the different tissue types characterising the sample under investigation. The main purpose of the present chapter is to provide a review of the most recent and significant applications of non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) to MRS data in the field of tissue typing methods for tumour diagnosis. Specifically, NMF-based methods for the recovery of constituent spectra in ex vivo and in vivo brain MRS data, for brain tissue pattern differentiation using magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) data and for automatic detection and visualisation of prostate tumours, will be described. Furthermore, since severalNMFimplementations are available in the literature, a comparison in terms of pattern detection accuracy of some NMF algorithms will be reported and discussed, and the NMF performance forMRS data analysis will be compared with that of other blind source separation (BSS) techniques.status: publishe