Gadoxetate Acid-Enhanced MR Imaging for HCC: A Review for Clinicians

Abstract

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is increasingly being detected at an earlier stage, owing to the screening programs and regular imaging follow-up in high-risk populations. Small HCCs still pose diagnostic challenges on imaging due to decreased sensitivity and increased frequency of atypical features. Differentiating early HCC from premalignant or benign nodules is important as management differs and has implications on both the quality of life and the overall survival for the patients. Gadoxetate acid (Gd-EOB-DTPA, Primovist®, Bayer Schering Pharma) is a relatively new, safe and well-tolerated liver-specific contrast agent for magnetic resonance (MR) imaging of the liver that has combined perfusion- and hepatocyte-specific properties, allowing for the acquisition of both dynamic and hepatobiliary phase images. Its high biliary uptake and excretion improves lesion detection and characterization by increasing liver-to-lesion conspicuity in the added hepatobiliary phase imaging. To date, gadoxetate acid-enhanced MRI has been mostly shown to be superior to unenhanced MRI, computed tomography, and other types of contrast agents in the detection and characterization of liver lesions. This review article focuses on the evolving role of gadoxetate acid in the characterization of HCC, differentiating it from other mimickers of HCC.

Presence of a hypovascular hepatic nodule showing hypointensity on hepatocyte‐phase image is a risk factor for hypervascular hepatocellular carcinoma

“…Recent advances in imaging techniques may enable earlier and more accurate diagnosis of HCC . Gadoxetic acid, a liver‐specific contrast agent that is retained by hepatocytes and excreted into the bile ducts , allows monitoring of small lesions over a long period.…”

Surveillance and Diagnostic Algorithm for Hepatocellular Carcinoma Proposed by the Liver Cancer Study Group of Japan: 2014 Update

“…It has actually become common to encounter cases where hypervascular HCC or nodule-in-nodule HCC that is undetectable by MDCT is detected in a routine screening by EOB-MRI because of early enhancement in the arterial phase or clear hypointensity in the hepatobiliary phase [11,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82,83,84,85,86,87,88,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98,99,100,101,102,103]. Furthermore, studies comparing the diagnostic performance of EOB-MRI and MDCT for hypervascular HCC have shown that EOB-MRI is superior or, at the very l...…”

MRI with Gadolinium‐Based Nanoparticles

“…(b2) 20 min after administration of Gd-eOB-dTpA, the high contrast allows a better diagnosis of the tumor (Reprinted with permission from Ref. [37]. © Hindawi publishing Corporation).…”