spant: An R package for magnetic resonance spectroscopy analysis

Abstract

Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) allows the measurement of small molecules (metabolites) in the body without the use of harmful radiation. Based on the same basic principles and technology behind Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), most modern MRI scanners are also capable of acquiring MRS-making the technique highly suited to a number of clinical applications (Oz et al. (2014)). Despite the success of MRS in the research environment, clinical translation has proven slow due to a number of technical and practical reasons, with challenges associated with reliable data processing and analysis having particular importance (Wilson et al. (2019)). The spant (SPectroscopy ANalysis Tools) package has been developed to: (1) provide open-source implementations of traditional and modern MRS processing and analysis techniques for routine analysis (Near et al. (2021)) and (2) aid the development, validation and comparison of new algorithms and analysis pipelines.