Monte Carol modeling of the non-monoexponential CPMG relaxation in iron overload

In patients with iron overload, the CPMG measurement in liver exhibits a non-monoexponential decay. By using a theoretical model, one can decompose the decay into two major components associated with the two forms of endogenous tissue iron: ferritin and hemosiderin. A separate quantification may be useful in assessing iron storage and chelation therapy, because ferritin iron may more directly reflect iron toxicity. However, the validity of the quantitative model has not been previously studied with numerical simulations of in vivo iron deposits with heterogeneous sizes and spatial distributions. In this work, we investigate the models performance in realistic tissue geometry by simulating the MR relaxation from iron spheres with statistically distributed sphere sizes. The simulated iron concentrations of ferritin and hemosiderin were varied over a clinically relevant range. As a reference, conventional bi-exponential fits to the signals were also calculated.

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