Abstract #4049

Quantitative in Vivo Assessment of Hepatic Lipid Using High-Speed T2-Corrected Multi-Echo Spectroscopy

Puneet Sharma¹, Nashiely Pineda², Miriam Vos³, Qin Xu², Xiaoping Hu², Diego Martin¹

¹Radiology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA; ²Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA; ³Hepatology, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, Atlanta, GA, USA

In addition to susceptibility effects, a primary limitation of MRS for clinical use in the abdomen has been motion sensitivity and impractical scan duration. In this study, a rapid, breath-hold, single-voxel MRS technique was applied in vivo for the quantification of hepatic lipid (HL). The multi-echo technique provides T2-correction of %HL, which was shown to be significantly important due to measured variation in R2 of water and lipid. Clinical utility of the MRS method was established with reproducibility experiments, revealing robust in vivo %HL measurement within- and between imaging sessions.