Brain tumours remain an important cause of morbidity and mortality and afflict a large percentage of the European population. In children over 1 year of age, brain tumours are the most common solid malignancies that cause disease-related death.

Diagnosis using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is non-invasive, but only achieves 60-90% accuracy depending on the tumour type and grade. The current gold standard classification of a brain tumour by histopathological analysis of biopsy is an invasive surgical procedure and incurs a risk of 1-2% morbidity, in addition to healthcare costs and stress to patients. For tumours that evolve slowly (e.g. pilocytic astrocytoma in children), repeated biopsies may not be advisable or practical. There is a need to improve brain tumour classification, and to provide non-invasive methods for brain tumour diagnosis and prognosis, to aid patient management and treatment. Three techniques are available to address these needs:

1. Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) is a non-invasive technique that provides biochemical information on tissue in vivo.
2. HR-MAS is applied to biopsies in vitro in order to improve characterisation and DNA microarray analysis. This can determine tumour phenotype from gene expression profiles and predict better survival than classical histology.
3. MRS, coupled with conventional MRI, provides metabolite profiles of a single voxel (SV) of tumour tissue. It also produces a molecular image of particular tumour metabolites in 10 minutes using multi-voxel (MV) techniques.

Experts within the consortium Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Universidad de Valencia and University of Birmingham