The level of the anastomosis was at a median 5 cm (3-12 cm) above the anal verge. There was no 30-day mortality. Nine (27.2%) of the 33 patients developed a symptomatic anastomotic leakage which was diagnosed at a median of 8 days (range 4-14) postoperatively. The serum CRP was increased in patients who leaked from postoperative day 2 onwards (P = 0.004 on day 2; P < 0.001 on day 3-8). The WBC was decreased in preoperatively irradiated patients on days 1-5 (P

Liver fibrosis stage strongly influences the hepatocyte-specific uptake of Gd-EOB-DTPA. Potentially the normalisation technique and K (Hep) will reduce patient and system bias, yielding a robust approach to non-invasive liver function determination.

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Purpose: To quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the water-signal performance of the Consistent Intensity Inhomogeneity Correction (CIIC) method to correct for intensity inhomogeneities.Materials and Methods: Water-Fat volumes were acquired using 1.5 T and 3.0 T symmetrically sampled 2-point Dixon 3D MRI. Two datasets: 1) 10 muscle tissue ROIs from 10 subjects acquired with both 1.5 T and 3.0 T whole-body MRI. 2) 7 liver tissue ROIs from 36 patients imaged using 1.5 T MRI at six time points after Gd-EOB-DTPA injection. The performance of CIIC was evaluated quantitatively by analyzing its impact on the dispersion and bias of the water image ROI intensities, and qualitatively using side-by-side image comparisons.