Rapid acquisition technique for MR elastography of the liver

Abstract

Magnetic Resonance Elastography (MRE) of the liver is a novel noninvasive clinical diagnostic tool to stage fibrosis based on measured stiffness. The purpose of this study is to design, evaluate and validate a rapid MRE acquisition technique for noninvasively quantitating liver stiffness which reduces by half the scan time, thereby decreasing image registration errors between four MRE phase offsets. In vivo liver MRE was performed on 16 healthy volunteers and 14 patients with biopsy-proven liver fibrosis using the standard clinical Gradient Recalled Echo (GRE) MRE sequence (MREs) and a developed rapid GRE MRE sequence (MREr) to obtain the mean stiffness in an axial slice. The mean stiffness values obtained from the entire group using MREs and MREr were 2.72±0.85kPa and 2.7±0.85kPa, respectively, representing an insignificant difference. A linear correlation of R2=0.99 was determined between stiffness values obtained using MREs and MREr. Therefore, we can conclude that MREr can replace MREs, which reduces the scan time to half of that of the current standard acquisition (MREs), which will facilitate MRE imaging in patients with inability to hold their breath for long periods.

Prediction of liver cirrhosis, using diagnostic imaging tools

“…This study also showed that MRE could discriminate patients with moderate and severe fibrosis (grades 24) from those with mild fibrosis (sensitivity, 86%; specificity, 85%). Several studies show that MRE is more reliable for staging hepatic fibrosis compared to DWI and conventional MRI, with a powerful combination of sensitivity, specificity, likelihood ratios, diagnostic odds ratio, and area under the summary receiver operating characteristic curve values [51,[53][54][55] (Table 2). MRE can be easily added to standard abdominal MRI protocols, promising value added in staging liver cirrhosis.…”

Magnetic resonance elastography of the pancreas: Measurement reproducibility and relationship with age

“…Magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) is a noninvasive technique to estimate stiffness of soft tissues (9-15) and is currently a clinical diagnostic tool to stage liver fibrosis (16-20). To date there are few studies to evaluate the feasibility of in-vivo pancreatic MRE (21-24).…”

Editorial: A New Spin on Magnetic Resonance Elastography

“…Limitations seen with similar studies including placement of the passive driver on the patient, diff erences in body habitus aff ecting contact area, as well as the subtle diff erences in the spatial stiff ness maps due to diff erences in breath hold apply to both techniques (i.e., 3D and 2D) ( 27 ).…”