| Abstract: | Quantification of magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) signals is required for providing metabolite concentrations of the tissue under investigation. For estimating these concentrations several biochemical and acquisition conditions need to be taken into account. It is still a challenge to obtain reliable concentrations, as experimental conditions may have a detrimental effect on the spectral quality. The lineshape of MRS signals is affected, for instance, by inhomogeneities of the static magnetic field arising from imperfect shimming and tissue heterogeneities. To handle this type of distortions, we propose an extension of the self‐deconvolution method, where a common lineshape is estimated and a robust method with local regression is included to improve the smoothing of the estimated damping (or lineshape) function. This common lineshape is imposed in the metabolite quantification method and the spectral parameters (amplitude, frequency, damping and phase corrections) are obtained via nonlinear least squares. In this study, we considered distorted simulated, in vitro and in vivo rat brain signals which were lineshape corrected and quantitative results were compared in all three cases. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
