Truong Vuong, Duncan Niall W
Graduate Institute of Mind, Brain and Consciousness, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Brain and Consciousness Research Centre, TMU-ShuangHo Hospital, New Taipei City, Taiwan.
R Soc Open Sci. 2020 Aug 5;7(8):200600. doi: 10.1098/rsos.200600. eCollection 2020 Aug.
Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) has seen an increase in popularity as a method for studying the human brain. This approach is dependent on voxel localization and spectral quality, knowledge of which are essential for judging the validity and robustness of any analysis. As such, visualization plays a central role in appropriately communicating MRS studies. The quality of data visualization has been shown to be poor in a number of biomedical fields and so we sought to appraise this in MRS papers. To do this, we conducted a survey of the psychiatric single-voxel MRS literature. This revealed a generally low standard, with a significant proportion of papers not providing the voxel location and spectral quality information required to judge their validity or replicate the experiment. Based on this, we then present a series of suggestions for a minimal standard for MRS data visualization. The primary point of these is that both voxel location and MRS spectra be presented from all participants. Participant group membership should be indicated where more than one is included in the experiment (e.g. patients and controls). A set of suggested figure layouts that fulfil these requirements are presented with sample code provided to produce these (github.com/nwd2918/MRS-voxel-plot).
磁共振波谱学（MRS）作为一种研究人类大脑的方法越来越受欢迎。这种方法依赖于体素定位和光谱质量，了解这些对于判断任何分析的有效性和稳健性至关重要。因此，可视化在恰当地传达MRS研究中起着核心作用。数据可视化的质量在许多生物医学领域已被证明很差，所以我们试图在MRS论文中对此进行评估。为此，我们对精神科单体素MRS文献进行了一项调查。结果显示总体标准较低，相当一部分论文没有提供判断其有效性或重复实验所需的体素位置和光谱质量信息。基于此，我们随后提出了一系列关于MRS数据可视化最低标准的建议。这些建议的主要要点是展示所有参与者的体素位置和MRS光谱。如果实验中包括多个参与者组（例如患者和对照组），应指明参与者的组成员身份。文中给出了一组满足这些要求的建议图形布局，并提供了生成这些布局的示例代码（github.com/nwd2918/MRS-voxel-plot）。
