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About TARQUIN
TARQUIN is an analysis tool for automatically determining the quantities of molecules present in NMR spectroscopic data. The intended purpose of TARQUIN is to aid the characterisation of pathologies, in particular brain tumours, both non-invasively with in-vivo 1H MRS and ex-vivo with 1H HR-MAS. TARQUIN has the following features:
- Free to use and modify under the OSI approved GPL licence.
- Based on a flexible time-domain fitting routine designed to give accurate rapid and automated quantitation for routine analysis.
- Comes packaged with a quantum mechanically based metabolite simulator to allow basis set construction optimised for the investigation of particular pathologies.
- Works on both Linux and Windows operating systems.
- Capable of producing publication quality plots via Gnuplot.
- Includes both GUI (see below for screenshot) and command line interface for one-off and batch analyses.
Supported data formats
Unlike the ubiquitous DICOM MRI format, no accepted standard for storing raw MRS data has been defined. This has led to the situation where there are multiple manufacturer MRS formats each with multiple versions. As a result of this, supporting all the data formats used by the various manufactures is a significant task. Therefore we cannot guarantee that TARQUIN will work with your data.
The current aim for TARQUIN is to provide support (in the loosest sense of the word) for the main clinical magnet manufactures. A summary of the progress in achieving this is detailed below.
| Format | Reads FID | Reads parameters |
|---|---|---|
| Siemens DICOM | Yes | No |
| Siemens RDA | Yes | Yes |
| Philips DICOM | Yes | No |
| Philips SDAT/SPAR | Yes | Yes |
| GE | Yes | No |
| Dangerplot | Yes | Yes |
| Varian | Yes | Yes |
| Bruker | Yes | Yes |
The authors do not recieve formal funding for the development of TARQUIN. If you find the software useful please consider donating to the project via the link below. Whilst we are happy to code for free, certain tasks (mainly supporting the Windows platform) require the purchase of expensive development tools and copies of operating systems (XP, Vista, Windows 7, Visual Studio etc...).
