Alexander R. Guimaraes1,2,
Luiz Siqueira2, Giles Boland2, Deborah Gervais2,
Michael Chew2, Peter Hahn2
1Radiology/Massachusetts
General Hospital, Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, MA,
USA; 2Radiology/Massachusetts General Hospital, Division of
Abdominal Imaging & Interventional Radiology, Boston, MA, USA
The diagnosis, staging and quantification of fibrosis relies on liver biopsy, which is invasive with significant risks. We studied retrospectively in 123 patients with either Hepatitis B or C, having recent random liver biopsy, whether T2 correlated to liver fibrosis stage. Our retrospective analysis demonstrates that there is a monotonically increasing T2 value with increasing fibrosis stage. We validated our quantitative approach with phantom data, which demonstrate, that there is close agreement in absolute T2 values when comparing a 2 point fit from TSE data to multi-echo CPMG. Furthermore, our results in a rat model corroborate our human studies.