Tinnitus PRESS MR Spectroscopy

This dataset holds the raw spectroscopy signals behind a study by Joanna Wójcik, Tomasz Wolak and colleagues at the Institute of Physiology and Pathology of Hearing (World Hearing Center, Kajetany, Poland). The study asked whether glutamate and other brain metabolites differ between people with chronic subjective tinnitus and people without it, and whether they depend on the side on which the tinnitus is heard. The spectra were published on Zenodo in September 2023 under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 alongside the article in Scientific Reports.

Composition

There are 77 adults: 25 healthy volunteers, 24 with unilateral tinnitus and 28 with bilateral tinnitus; everyone in the tinnitus groups had heard it for at least six months. Table 1 of the article reports 36 women and 41 men, aged 21 to 71, with similar mean ages (44 to 46) across the three groups. Each participant contributes four spectra, one per region, for 308 files in total. A tab-separated file assigns each participant ID to the control, unilateral or bilateral group; it carries no age, sex or clinical scores.

Acquisition

Scans took place between 2018 and 2020 on a 3 T Siemens Prisma Fit with a 20-channel head coil. A single-voxel PRESS sequence (TR 2000 ms, TE 40 ms, 128 averages, 1024 points, 1200 Hz bandwidth) with Siemens water suppression and no lipid suppression sampled four cubic voxels of 1.5 cm edge length in the left and right temporal lobes and the left and right frontal lobes. A technician placed the voxels by hand on T2-weighted localizer images in three planes. The files are Siemens RDA exports: a plain-text header followed by the binary free induction decay.

Annotations

None beyond the group label per participant. Metabolite estimates from the article (LCModel fits of Glx, total NAA, total choline and myo-inositol) are not part of the record.

Known limitations

• Only spectra are shared. The T1-weighted screening scan and the T2-weighted localizer images were acquired but are not in the record, so voxel tissue composition cannot be recomputed from the data.
• People with depression or anxiety disorders were excluded, so the tinnitus group does not reflect the full clinical population.
• Age, sex and hearing measures are given only as group summaries in the article.
• The license forbids commercial use and requires derived data to be shared under the same terms.