SCSA based MATLAB pre-processing toolbox for 1H MR spectroscopic water suppression and denoising

Abstract

In vivo 1H Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) is a useful tool in assessing neurological and metabolic disease, and to improve tumor treatment. Different pre-processing pipelines have been developed to obtain optimal results from the acquired data with sophisticated data fitting, peak suppression, and denoising protocols. We introduce a Semi-Classical Signal Analysis (SCSA) based Spectroscopy pre-processing toolbox for water suppression and data denoising, which allows researchers to perform water suppression using SCSA with phase correction and apodization filters and denoising of MRS data, and data fitting has been included as an additional feature, but it is not the main aim of the work. The fitting module can be passed on to other software. The toolbox is easy to install and to use: 1) import water unsuppressed MRS data acquired in Siemens, Philips and .mat file format and allow visualization of spectroscopy data, 2) allow pre-processing of single voxel and multi-voxel spectra, 3) perform water suppression and denoising using SCSA, 4) incorporate iterative nonlinear least squares fitting as an extra feature. This article provides information about how the above features have been included, along with details of the graphical user interface using these features in MATLAB. The code can be downloaded from https://github.com/EMANG-KAUST/GUI_spectroscopy. Keywords: Eigenfunctions of the Schrödinger operator, Magnetic resonance spectroscopy, Water suppression, Denoising, Singular value decomposition, Digital signal processing