Preface Signal analysis and signal treatment are integral parts of all types of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. In the last ten years, much has been achieved in the development of new methods for analysing standard NMR signals such as relaxation curves and 1- dimensional spectra. At the same time new NMR techniques such as NMR Imaging and multidimensional spectroscopy have appeared, requiring entirely new methods of signal analysis. However, until now, most NMR texts and reference books limited their presentation of signal processing to a short introduction to the principles of the Fourier Transform, signal convolution, apodisation and noise reduction. Therefore, if one wished to understand the mathematics of the newer signal processing techniques, it was usually necessary to go back to the primary references in NMR, chemometrics and mathematics journals. The objective of this book was to fill this void by presenting, in a single volume, both the theory and applications of most of these new techniques to Time-Domain, Frequency- Domain and Space-Domain NMR signals. Although the book is primarily aimed at NMR users in the medical, industrial and academic fields, it should also interest chemometricians and programmers working with other techniques. In the same way that concepts derived from astronomy (Maximum Entropy Method), Near Infrared Spectroscopy (Multivariate Statistical Analysis) and chromatography (Stochastic Excitation) have proven to be fertile in NMR, I am sure that the ideas presented by the authors in this book will be of great use in other fields where similar signals - images, relaxation curves, spectra, multidimensional sequential data - are to be treated and analysed. The procedures are presented in detail and some of the computer programs are included, either as source code or in executable form. For those who wish to refer to the primary articles, almost 1000 references are given. I wish to thank Bernard Vandeginste who was the first to realise there was a need for such a book, the authors whose enthusiasm for this project echoed my own, and my family, both near and far, without whose support it would not have been possible. Douglas N. Rutledge