Speedy component resolution: An improved tool for processing diffusion-ordered spectroscopy data

Diffusion-based NMR techniques (e.g., diffusion-ordered spectroscopy, DOSY), which can be used to distinguish between the signals of different components of a mixture, are steadily gaining in popularity. When processing data from a DOSY experiment it is often desirable to reconstruct the spectra of individual components; here, multivariate methods that take advantage of the covariance between the resonances of a given component can often be advantageous. This paper presents a minor variation on the established CORE method, speedy component resolution (SCORE), that gives a major improvement in performance. In common with CORE it can use any experimental sampling scheme and is adaptable to different experimental decay shapes, but unlike CORE it is very fast and relatively insensitive to starting guesses. The method is demonstrated on a mixture of quinine, geraniol, and camphene in deuteriated methanol, where all four component spectra can be extracted in less than 15 s.