PADE-LAPLACE ANALYSIS IN THE FITTING OF MULTIEXPONENTIAL NUCLEAR-MAGNETIC-RESONANCE RELAXATION DECAY CURVES

Pade-Laplace analysis has been proposed as a method for identifying the number of exponential components in a multi-exponential decay. The usefulness of this method has been examined by computer simulations, for data sets typical of T1-rho measurements in NMR. Emphasis was placed on resolving exponential functions with similar time constants in the presence of experimental noise. For three exponential decays Pade-Laplace analysis was found to be only on a par with non-linear least-squares (NLLS) fitting at identifying the three components. Similarly no improvement was seen in the accuracy of the fitted parameters over those found in NLLS fitting.