Improving the detection of low concentration metabolites in magnetic resonance spectroscopy by digital filtering.

In vivo detection and quantitation of metabolites is often limited by their low concentration. As far as magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) is concerned, detection and quantitation can be significantly improved by reduction of the observed spectral width (SW). The reduction is limited to the spreading of resonances in the bandwidth unless high performance digital filters are used. Indeed, these filters avoid the folding of unwanted resonances such as water peak into the main frequency spectrum and therefore allow reduction of the spectral width to its optimal value. These filters are now available on most MRS systems but their use is not common even if, as we show in the particular case of proton MRS, a significant increase in signal-to-noise ratio (two-fold factor for SW reduction from 5000 Hz to 1351 Hz) can be achieved. This signal-to-noise improvement allows better quantitation accuracy.