Exact ML estimation of spectroscopic parameters

In a paper on spectroscopic imaging published in this journal Spielman et a l. (J. Magn. Reson. 79, 66-77 (1988)) made the important point that a prior i information about the compounds present can and should be incorporated in to the estimation of spectroscopic signal parameters. They proposed using t he maximum likelihood (ML) approach for parameter estimation, but failed to incorporate properly the full a priori information that was assumed to be available. Consequently they ended up with a spectroscopic imaging method t hat is only a suboptimal approximation of the ML method. In this paper we d erive the exact ML method, present a computationally efficient implementati on of it (which is much faster than the direct implementation suggested by Spielman et al. for their suboptimal method), and illustrate numerically th e performance gain that can be achieved over the method of Spielman et al. (C) 2000 Academic Press.