PDFF measurement by MR imaging provided a noninvasive, accurate estimation of the presence and grading of hepatic steatosis in patients with NAFLD. Hepatic fibrosis reduced the correlation between biopsy results and PDFF.

No abstract

Although it has been demonstrated that quantitative measures of cerebral blood flow (CBF) can be obtained with the singular value decomposition (SVD) algorithm, the extent to which quantitative CBF measurements can be utilized under pathophysiological conditions has not been systematically studied. A total of five healthy volunteers and five patients with unilateral carotid artery occlusion were studied. Only magnetic resonance (MR) images were acquired for the volunteer group while both MR and positron emission tomography (PET) images were acquired for the patient group. Assessments of CBF from normal volunteers compared favorably with values reported in the literature. However, while a linear relationship was observed for each patient when MR measured CBF was compared to that obtained from PET, this linear relationship diminished when all patients were analyzed as a group (r ‫؍‬ 0.41). A correction factor (CF) was proposed that was equal to the ratio of the area of the venous output function (VOF) in each patient to the mean VOF obtained from the volunteer group. After globally scaling the CBF of each patient based on the experimentally derived CF, a substantial improvement was observed (a slope of 1.02 and r ‫؍‬ 0.8 for the linear regression line) in the relationship between MR estimated CBF and those obtained from PET.

Both MRI-PDFF and MRS can be used for accurate quantification of hepatic steatosis.

Pancreas and vertebral body MRI-PDFF is well correlated in NAFLD patients and both of them are higher in diabetic patients which may explain increased bone fractures in diabetics. MRI-PDFF can be used to demonstrate fat fractions of different organs and tissues and to understand fat metabolism.