Noninvasive Liver Stiffness Assessment with Tagged MRI in Cirrhotic Patients with Child-Pugh Scores

Sohae Chung¹, Kyung-Eun Kim², Mi-Suk Park², Leon Axel¹

Liver fibrosis is an important prognostic factor in patients with liver disease, and its assessment can be used to guide therapy. It is known to result in increased mechanical stiffness, so that the assessment of liver stiffness is a key feature of current noninvasive approaches, for example, by detecting the motion of the liver with ultrasound or MRI. In our previous study, we described a new noninvasive approach for the assessment of liver stiffness by using magnetization-tagged MRI (tMRI) to measure the cardiac-induced motion and deformation in the liver. In this work, we applied our method to 45 cirrhotic patients with Child-Pugh scores.