Clinical Spectroscopy

We are involved in several in vivo spectroscopy projects at 1.5T. While our major focus has been in studying brain tumor patients, we are also working with epilepsy patients and pediatric cases involving metabolic disorders or cerebral trauma.

In vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) allows the noninvasive evaluation of metabolite patterns in human brain tumors. Because of differences in cell type and growth characteristics of tumors, it is probable that tumor types will have unique metabolic fingerprints. Our goal is to provide a classification scheme of tumor types which is relative to the treatment program, correlates with biopsy but is totally non-invasive.

In this figure we show the generation of a proton NMR spectrum from a region of tumor tissue (A) and a region of normal, healthy tissue (B). Notice that the pattern of "peaks" is different for the 2 spectra.