New lab member, new paper!

Welcome Chris Davies-Jenkins! Congratulations Alex Craven!

We are beyond excited to welcome a new member to our group! From beautiful Wales, Chris Davies-Jenkins has joined us for a postdoctoral fellowship. Chris has previously worked at Swansea University and CUBRIC in Cardiff, and will contribute his expertise in MRS data processing and analysis to our ongoing projects.

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In other exciting news, NMR Biomed has published a major paper with our friend and collaborator Dr. Alexander Craven of Bergen University, who led a wonderful joint effort with many people all over the world we really enjoy working with. Alex set up multiple data analysis pipelines wrapping seven different contemporary linear-combination modeling algorithms, and hooked them up to the Big GABA data repository, because we wanted to find out how well different tools agree in their quantitative estimates of GABA levels.

TLDR; the interclass correlations between tools were, on average, fairly moderate, with an average ICC of 0.38 and considerably variation across pairs of algorithms. We could show that the agreement can be improved (to an average of 0.44) by including a dedicated term accounting for co-edited macromolecular signals, confirming what Helge Zöllner had found in his recent extensive investigation of the optimal parametrization of this term. Nevertheless, the substantial variability introduced just by the choice of fitting algorithm is concerning, and is a strong motivation for our future work to improve the accuracy and precision of MRS data, particularly in the low-SNR regime.