Quantitative Assessment of Liver Fat with Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Spectroscopy

By Scott B. Reeder, Irene Cruite, G. Hamilton, Claude B. Sirlin. Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, 2011

844 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Hepatic steatosis is characterized by abnormal and excessive accumulation of lipids within hepatocytes. It is an important feature of diffuse liver disease, and the histological hallmark of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Other conditions associated with steatosis include alcoholic liver disease, viral hepatitis, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and genetic lipodystrophies, cystic fibrosis liver disease, and hepatotoxicity from various therapeutic agents. Liver biopsy, the current clinical gold standard for assessment of liver fat, is invasive and has sampling errors, and is not optimal for screening, monitoring, clinical decision‐making, or well suited for many types of research studies. Noninvasive methods that accurately and objectively quantify liver fat are needed. Ultrasound (US) and computed tomography (CT) can be used to assess liver fat but have limited accuracy as well as other limitations. Magnetic resonance (MR) techniques can decompose the liver signal into its fat and water signal components and therefore assess liver fat more directly than CT or US. Most MR techniques measure the signal fat‐fraction (the fraction of the liver MR signal attributable to liver fat), which may be confounded by numerous technical and biological factors and may not reliably reflect fat content. By addressing the factors that confound the signal fat‐fraction, advanced MR techniques measure the proton density fat‐fraction (the fraction of the liver proton density attributable to liver fat), which is a fundamental tissue property and a direct measure of liver fat content. These advanced techniques show promise for accurate fat quantification and are likely to be commercially available soon. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2011;. © 2011 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.

Subfields: Epidemiology, Hepatology, Surgery

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a0684154cec7a285978a0624192150440a3f22ac

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In Epidemiology

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In Hepatology

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Citations in the corpus

• NAFLD: a multisystem disease. (2015, background): “S48 Journal of Hepatology 201 regarding the sensitivity and specificity of ultrasonography to detect liver fat, the reader is referred to the following [10–12]; and for information, regarding the sensitivity and reproducibility of magnetic resonance techniques to assess liver fat [13,14].”
• The diagnosis and management of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease: Practice guidance from the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (2018, methodology): “MR imaging, either by spectroscopy((92)) or by proton density fat fraction,((93,94)) is an excellent noninvasive modality for quantifying HS and is being widely used in NAFLD clinical trials.”
• Diagnosis and Treatment of Alcohol‐Associated Liver Diseases: 2019 Practice Guidance From the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (2020, neutral): “(120) Liver biopsy is rarely needed for the diagnosis of alcohol-associated steatosis.”