Magnetic resonance spectroscopy in the diagnosis and follow-up of brain tumors

Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) is nowadays considered as a main MRI investigation modality in the clinical routine jointly with conventional anatomical and functional magnetic resonance imag- ing for studying brain tumours. MRS provides complementary information about cellular metabolism. This allows differentiating the brain tumours from abscess, the diagnosis of the tumour type, characterization of brain tumours, as well as local study of the morphological abnormalities observed in conventional MRI. The MRS could be used in the therapeutic follow-up for evaluating the pathological active area of brain, and allows optimizing the guided biopsy as well as to differentiating recurrent tumour from a necrosis.