Abstract #4035

T1, T2 and T2* Relaxation Time Measurements in the Liver: Reproducibility, Inter- And Intra-Observer Variability

Caroline L. Hoad¹, Naaventhan Palaniyappan², Carolyn Costigan¹, Eleanor F. Cox¹, Luca Marciani², Philip Kaye³, Neil Guha², Robin C. Spiller², Penelope A. Gowland¹

¹Physics and Astronomy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom; ²Nottingham Digestive Diseases Centre, NIHR Biomedical Research Unit, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, Nottingham, United Kingdom; ³Department of Cellular Pathology, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, Derby Royal Hospital, Derby, United Kingdom

Reproducibility of whole liver relaxation time measurements using respiratory triggered echo-planar imaging was carried out on 8 healthy volunteers, scanned on 2 separate occasions. Modal T₁, T₂ and T₂^* parameters were obtained from fitting a Gaussian curve to the histograms of the fitted data. The coefficient of variance (CV) was 1.5 %, 3.1 % and 4.3 % for T₁, T₂ and T₂^* respectively. Inter- and Intra-observer variability was assessed using relaxation time data sets from 20 chronic liver disease patients. Inter- and intra-observer CVs were below 1% suggesting that biological variability and scanner related noise dominated the CVs of the reproducibility data.