Comparison of Different CSF Correction Methods in a MRS Study of Depressed Psychiatric Patients

John DeWitt Port¹, Ileana Hancu², Heidi Alyssa Edmonson¹, Zhonghao Bao³, Mark A. Frye⁴

Various methods have been used to correct for the amount of CSF within spectroscopic voxels. However, it remains unclear which method is best. We performed CSF correction on an MRS dataset comparing depressed psychiatric patients to normal controls, using the ratio to creatine as well as two anatomically-based CSF correction methods. All three CSF correction methods yielded significant results for most statistical comparisons; ROC analysis demonstrated no single CSF correction technique to be better than the others. If the metabolite value used in the denominator is stable, ratios may actually improve statistical sensitivity relative to anatomically-based CSF correction methods.