Patent ID: 7319784

Claim:
A method for magnetic resonance spectroscopy experiments of an element to be examined in a patient comprising: defining an arbitrarily-shaped volume of interest (VOI) of the element inside a 3D computer image of the patient containing also non-VOI material; using a numerical optimization algorithm to find an optimum convex polyhedron, such that the volume of the polyhedron contains a maximum volume of the VOI and a minimum (or zero) volume of non-VOI; evaluating and optimizing the convex polyhedron with pre-defined parameters, including a maximum allowable amount of non-VOI allowed inside the convex polyhedron, a maximum allowable amount of VOI allowed outside the convex polyhedron and a maximum number of sides of the polyhedron; using the polyhedron to automate and optimize the definition of a conformal voxel for the element in the patient; and carrying out magnetic resonance spectroscopy of the patient using the conformal excitation voxel; wherein the planes of the convex polyhedron are used to define/prescribe the size and location of selective excitation volumes and/or spatial saturation slices of the magnetic resonance spectrospopy.