Optimization and comparison of coil combination and spectral registration strategies for in-vivo DW-MRS

Diffusion-weighted MRS (DW-MRS) suffers from low signal intensity and large phase errors when applying strong diffusion weighting. Coil combination and spectral registration are vital as spectra with high b-values are usually poorly reconstructed. This work aims at the optimization of post-processing pipeline with singular value decomposition (SVD)-based spectral registration and the comparison of different regimes of coil combination and spectral registration for in-vivo DW-MRS post-processing. The SNR of post-processed spectra and the metabolite diffusivities are assessed. The statistical outcomes suggest that the SVD-based spectral registration could improve the SNR of DW-MRS signal at high b-values and therefore alleviate diffusivity overestimations.