Developing a Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Instrument for use in Consumer Health

Metabolomics has evolved over the past 50 years from “you are what you eat” to databases of thousands of metabolites, deterministic pathways and linking to multiple-omics. State of the art labortatory-based instruments including Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and Liquid Chromotograph - Mass Spectrometry (LQ-MS) are highly sensitive and able to resolve thousands of metabolites in complex biological solutions such as human blood. Clinically based instruments such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Spectroscopy (MRI & MRS) are capable of imaging and identifying tissue composition in vivo. Both lab-based NMR and clinic-based MRS instruments are complex, expensive and require expert operators. There is an opportunity to make a new class of instruments which enables general health tracking through non invasive, in vivo metabolomic measurements. We describe early development efforts of such a device including methods to increase signal to noise using novel filtering techniques, simulations of the device performance and design of the magnet.