Michelle Nystrom1, Carl Yuan-Feng Lo1, Phil W. Chu1, Susan Moyher Noworolski1,2, Aliya Qayyum1
1Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA; 2Graduate Group in Bioengineering, San Francisco & Berkeley, University of California, San Francisco
Hepatic steatosis is currently diagnosed by invasive liver biopsies, which are prone to sampling error. Dual-echo MR imaging offers a non-invasive technique that evaluates the entire liver. Signal intensity loss of the liver between the two echo images was color-coded for steatosis grades on 38 NAFLD patients and 20 healthy volunteers. Two MR readers interpretation of the colormaps strongly agreed with the corresponding histopathological results (κ =0.59-0.67) and each other (κ =0.89). Steatosis was considered heterogeneous in 60% of the NAFLD patients. This study showed that such colormaps can readily and easily be interpreted to assess steatosis severity and heterogeneity.