Estee Fleischman1, Lauren Dutcher1,
David Thomasson2, Adeline Louie2, Haresh Mani3,
David Kleiner3, Caryn Morse1, Colleen Hadigan1
1National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, United States; 2Diagnostic
Radiology Department, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, United
States; 3National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health,
Bethesda, MD, United States
There
is growing interest in the application of 1H-MRS as a non-invasive approach
to quantify hepatic triglyceride. This
study was designed to establish the ability of 1H-MRS to accurately assess
hepatic fat compared to histological scoring. Fifty subjects completed 1H-MRS
of the liver within 30 days of diagnostic biopsy. The mean hepatic triglyceride content by
1H-MRS for each histologic grade was 9%, 23%, 40% and 56%, respectively. The correlation between the two methods was
r=0.88, p<0.0001. With the phantom data we achieved an r=0.98 (p=0.02)
over a range of fat-water fractions of 10 to 20 % using the standardized
formula.