Mixture model of NMR - Its application to diagnosis and treatment of brain cancer

Abstract

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) is widely used technique in cancer diagnosis and treatment planning. It is employed to search for the high concentration regions of particular metabolites, which are directly related to the concentration of cancer cells. NMR signal maybe be characterized by a set of peaks which are representation of every distinct metabolite. Area under peak must be calculated in order to obtain proper information about metabolite amount. Commercially available software allows for the analysis of one-peak-in-time only. The proposed technique, based on Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), allows for modeling all-peaks-in-time, and corrects after the neighboring peaks giving more accurate estimates of metabolite concentration. The resulting software processes NMR signal from the very beginning up to the final result, which is given in a form of so called metabolite map.