MRSHub

Looking back at my graduate student days, I was struggling a lot with the lack of access to the field of MRS. There was practically no public resource or meaningful exchange going on that you would know of, if you didn’t know anyone. There were no tutorials that would teach me how to use the stubborn analysis software, so I tried and failed with all of them.

I ended up making a million mistakes. I vividly remember following the LCModel manual to a T, including the instructions to acquire basis spectra by measuring phantom solutions. Because no one told me not to. Painful hours were wasted mixing chemicals with buffer, carefully adding azide, and scanning through a Saturday night. In response to an e-mail cry for help after multiple error message, I was finally told “Measuring basis sets is a painful process. You should simulate instead”. Now I had to learn how to simulate.

In the end, I made it all work with the help of many helpful veterans who I bombarded with e-mails. But I just re-invented the wheel like many others before, only to develop processing pipelines for my datasets. To this day, I receive a lot of e-mails from graduate students who were given an MRS dataset in some oblique file format, and have no idea where to even get started. Enter the MRSHub.

The MRSHub is, in part, an attempt to lower the threshold to step into the MRS world for newcomers, by providing a curated collection of resources for the analysis of magnetic resonance spectroscopy data. The MRSHub aims to provide a comprehensive collection of software tools, code snippets, repositories, and other useful resources. Novice MRS users can use it as a launchpad to explore the many facets or MRS data analysis. Experienced researchers and method developers can collaborate to build on each others efforts, and disseminate their software through a single, centralized hub. Most importantly, there is a discussion forum to seek support, ask questions, and connect with MRS experts.

The MRSHub is maintained by the Committee for MRS Code and Data Sharing of the MR Spectroscopy Study Group of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM), and was called to life at the annual ISMRM meeting in Montréal, Canada, in 2019.