Quantifying Liver Fat with Combined Complex-Based and Magnitude-Based Water-Fat Separation

Abstract

Proton density fat fraction (PDFF) is emerging as a useful quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) biomarker for the diagnosis of hepatic steatosis. In this work, a hybrid method combining complex-based and magnitude-based water-fat separation was proposed to provide accurate measurements of liver PDFF. Clinical experiments were performed to evaluate the feasibility and accuracy of the method proposed. The results demonstrated that PDFF results obtained with the proposed method had excellent correlation and agreement with those calculated from magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS).

Keywords

• magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
• liver
• fat quantification
• water-fat separation
• IDEAL algorithm