From day to day, the role of HRMAS (High-Resolution Magic Angle Sinning) Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (NMRS) in medical diagnosis is increasing. This technique enables setting up metabolite profiles of ex vivo pathological and healthy tissue. Automatic spectrum quantitation enables monitoring of diseases. However for several metabolites, the values of chemical shifts of proton groups may slightly differ according to the micro-environment in the tissue or cells, in particular to its pH. This hampers accurate estimation of the metabolite concentrations mainly when using quantitation algorithms based on a metabolite basis-set. The present word is devoted to the optimization of NMR metabolite basis set signals, particularly to the algorithms of chemical shift mismatch correction. Two sighal processing (“warping”) methods were developed for simple and fast spectrum optimization : signal stretching/shrinking (resampling) and spectrum splitting. Then, another optimization method, QM-QUEST, coupling Quantrum Mechanical simulation and quantitation algorithms was implemented. The latter provides more robust fitting while limiting user involvement and respects the correct fingerprints of metabolites. Its efficiency is demonstrated by accurately quantitating signals from tissue samples of human brains with oligodendroglioma, obtained at 11.7 Tesla and spectra of cells acquired at 9.4T by HRMAS-NMR. As the necessity of fast NMR signal simulation based on quantum Mechanics is raised in the thesis, a part of the word is dedicated to an approximate method speeding-up the calculations. The algorithm based on spin-system fragmentation could become an important part of the QM-QUEST optimization method and will be implemented as an option of simulation in NMR-SCOPE, module of the jMRUI software package.
