Postprocessing of the spectrum to suppress baseline deviations from zero that may be superimposed on desired spectral lines. These deviations may be due either to various instrumental effects or to very broad spectral lines.

Convolution differentiation is a method of suppressing broad underlying spectral lines in order to emphasize narrower spectral lines. Strong smoothing of the spectrum (e.g., by severe negative exponential weighting of the time data) will suppress the narrow lines but minimally affect very broad ones; subtracting such a smoothed spectrum from the original will largely remove the contributions from the broad lines. This provides a means of baseline correction.

Echo offset is the time setting of spin echo and gradient echo to be not coincident and to generate phase differences between different spectral line signals (e.g., water and fat). The echo offset is the product of the frequency line difference and the time difference (TD) in the echo times and is equal to the magnitude of the result of the phase difference between two spectral lines. Phases may not change linearly with echo offset time in the presence of a large field inhomogeneity. An echo offset excitation pulse sequence can be used in the magnetic field mapping method, to generate maps from which the standard deviation of the phase difference can be calculated.

(FWHM) A commonly used measure of the width at half the maximum value of peaked functions such as spectral lines or slice profiles and important measure of the quality of an imaging device and its spatial resolution. As the name states, the FWHM is measured by identifying the points on the signal curve, which are half the maximum value. The horizontal distance between these two points is called the FWHM. For a spectral line, this will be proportional to 1/T2.

The use of MR spectroscopy for acquiring functional activation of the brain.
There are two possible approaches:
In the first, localized spectra of brain water are acquired and subtle changes in these spectra reflect the biophysical water environment. Changes in T2 due to deoxyhaemoglobin concentration may be detected in this way. The disadvantages of poor spatial resolution are to some extent offset by the high signal to noise ratio SNR of the spectroscopic data.
An alternative approach is to use MR spectroscopy directly to detect metabolites that are altered by brain activation. These include lactate and glucose. Such experiments have inherently poor spatial and temporal resolution, but do give a direct indication of the metabolic response of the brain to functional activation.