MRI methods have been used to measure increased brain water content in hepatic encephalopathy (HE) patients. However, these methods lack specificity to measure the increased water content from either the intracellular or extracellular compartment. In this work, we use a free-water eliminated diffusion tensor imaging (FWE-DTI) data processing approach to calculate the free water volume content fraction (fFW) in the brains of HE and healthy control subjects. This water fraction is considered as a measure of water fraction contained in the extra-axonal and sulcal spaces. We found significant fFW increases among HE patients indicating low-grade edema and glial swelling.
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