Magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Data analysis for clinical applications

The aim of this thesis is to make quantitative MRS a more valuable and attractive tool for daily clinical routine use. In the first part of this thesis we will give a brief overview of clinical proton MRS, discussing some common clinical MRS problems. In the second part we will focus on developing a standard protocol to confront the accuracy of different MR scanners from different vendors, analyzing water signals with the open source software package jMRUI – v5.0. Then we will discuss some examples of T1, T2 estimation of water and metabolites at the 3T MR scanner of A.O.U. Meyer using the Siemens phantom aimed to quantitation of metabolites concentration. Some examples of quantitation coming from S.G.D. and S.M.N. hospital will be described too. In the final part some examples of in vivo prostate cancer spectroscopic data analysis will be described, illustrating the potential of MRS, the differences between Philips data analysis software and jMRUI-v5.0, and showing the problems in the daily clinical routine acquisitions too. These MRS data have been acquired at Philips Achieva 1.5 T (S.M.N. hospital). As a future development we will describe an interesting application of PMMA and gold nanoparticles to MR, using the know-how coming from biophotonics research at IFAC-CNR.