Liver stiffness assessment by tagged MRI of cardiac-induced liver motion

Cirrhosis is an important and growing public health problem, affecting millions of Americans and many more people internationally. A pathological hallmark of the progression to cirrhosis is the development of liver fibrosis, so that monitoring the appearance and progression of liver fibrosis can be used to guide therapy. Here, we report a method to use magnetization-tagged magnetic resonance imaging to measure the cardiac-induced motion and deformation in the liver, as a means for noninvasively assessing liver stiffness, which is related to fibrosis. The initial results show statistically significant differences between healthy and cirrhotic subjects in the direct comparisons of the maximum displacement (mm), and the maximum (P1) and minimum (P2) two-dimensional strains, through the cardiac cycle (3.514 ± 0.793, 2.184 ± 0.611; 0.116 ± 0.043, 0.048 ± 0.011; -0.094 ± 0.020, -0.041 ± 0.015; healthy, cirrhosis, respectively; P < 0.005 for all). There are also significant differences in the displacement-normalized P1 and P2 strains (mm(-1) ) (0.030 ± 0.008, 0.017 ± 0.007; -0.024 ± 0.006, -0.013 ± 0.004; healthy, cirrhosis, respectively; P < 0.005 for all). Therefore, this noninvasive imaging-based method is a promising means to assess liver stiffness using clinically available imaging tools.