Automated Analysis of Hepatic MR Elastography Images with Motion Artifacts and Signal Inhomogeneities

Bogdan Dzyubak¹, Armando Manduca², Kevin J. Glaser², Meng Yin², Richard L. Ehman²

MR Elastography (MRE) is increasingly being adopted as a practical approach for clinical diagnosis and staging of hepatic fibrosis using noninvasive measurements of liver stiffness. A fully automated algorithm that determines appropriate ROIs from which to report tissue stiffness and agrees with expert readers has been presented previously. Improvements that enable the algorithm to analyze images with motion artifact, signal inhomogeneity, and low edge contrast are presented here. The stiffnesses calculated by the algorithm across 500 cases had a similar discrepancy with clinical readers as the inter-reader discrepancy reported by our previous study.