Data driven methods to combine multi-channel phased array data such as singular value decomposition (SVD) can greatly improve SNR in MR spectra. Current SVD implementation has two primary limitations: 1) the assumption that noise is independent between coil channels; and 2) utilization of the entire spectrum to calculate the optimized coil combination. Here, we present a method using a whitened SVD (WSVD) matrix to decorrelate noise from individual coil elements, followed by an optimized and iterative windowing approach termed windowed whitened SVD (wWSVD) to determine the optimal subset of the spectrum for SVD analysis that is then used to combine multi-channel spectral data. We report a significant in vivo improvement in spectral SNR using wWSVD over WSVD.
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