Abstract #3848

Magnetic Susceptibility as a Field-Independent MRI Biomarker of Liver Iron Overload

Diego Hernando¹, Scott B. Reeder¹,²

¹Radiology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States; ²Medical Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States

MR-based quantification of liver magnetic susceptibility may enable field strength-independent quantification of liver iron concentration (LIC), for diagnosis, staging and treatment monitoring of hepatic iron overload. However, susceptibility measurement is challenging, due to the non-local effect of the susceptibility distribution on the measured B0. The purpose of this work is to demonstrate feasibility of MR-based LIC quantification using a fat-referenced approach to estimate liver susceptibility from the measured B0 field map. The proposed method is validated at 1.5T and 3T using an R2-based LIC measurement (Ferriscan) as the reference standard.