Frequency-Selective Quantification of Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Data

In this paper the possibility of obtaining accurate estimates of parameters of selected peaks in the presence of unknown or uninteresting spectral features in biomedical magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) signals is investigated. This problem is denoted by frequency-selective parameter estimation. A new time-domain technique based on maximum-phase finite impulse response (FIR) filters is presented. The proposed method is compared to a number of existing approaches: the application of a weighting function in the time domain, frequency domain fitting using a polynomial baseline, and the time-domain HSVD filter method. The ease of use and low computational complexity of the FIR filter method make it an attractive approach for frequency-selective parameter estimation. The methods are validated using simulations of relevant 13C and 31P MRS examples.