Liver Stiffness Assessment by Tagged MRI of Cardiac-Induced Liver Motion

Sohae Chung¹, Elodie Breton¹, Lorenzo Mannelli¹, Leon Axel¹

A pathological hallmark of the progression to cirrhosis is the development of liver fibrosis, so that monitoring the appearance and progression of liver fibrosis can be used to guide therapy. Fibrosis of the liver is known to result in increased mechanical stiffness; this is the basis of current noninvasive approaches to the assessment of liver stiffness with ultrasound or MRI. In this study, we used the pulsations of the heart as an intrinsic motion source to transiently deform the liver and magnetization-tagged MRI to measure the cardiac-induced motion and deformation in the liver for the assessment of liver stiffness.