The Impact of Dixon Fat Suppression on Liver T1 and DCE Perfusion Quantification

Yuan Le¹, Fatih Akisik¹, Brian M. Dale², Karen Koons¹, Chen Lin¹

The presence of fat signal affects both T1 and contrast concentration estimation that in turn can cause error in perfusion quantification from dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) MRI acquisitions, which are often performed without fat suppression. In this study, we compared the perfusion parameters estimated from non-fat suppressed in-phase images and Dixon water-only images acquired with TWIST-Dixon in a group of liver patients and found that the discrepancy in T1 and perfusion parameters correlates with the fat fraction. Such result suggests that TWIST-Dixon is a more reliable method for DCE perfusion, especial in fat containing tissues such as liver and pancreas.