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Updated: Dec 30, 2025
Fat-Water Phantoms for Magnetic Resonance Imaging Validation: A Flexible and Scalable Protocol
Published on: September 7, 2018
Low-level fat fraction quantification at 3 T: comparative study of different tools for water-fat reconstruction and
Radim Kořínek1, Martin Gajdošík2,3, Siegfried Trattnig2,4
1Institute of Scientific Instruments of the CAS, Kralovopolska 147, 612 64, Brno, Czech Republic. korinek@isibrno.cz.
Objectives:
Chemical Shift Encoded Magnetic Resonance Imaging (CSE-MRI)-based quantification of low-level (< 5% of proton density fat fraction-PDFF) fat infiltration requires highly accurate data reconstruction for the assessment of hepatic or pancreatic fat accumulation in diagnostics and biomedical research.
Materials And Methods:
We compare three software tools available for water/fat image reconstruction and PDFF quantification with MRS as the reference method. Based on the algorithm exploited in the tested software, the accuracy of fat fraction quantification varies. We evaluate them in phantom and in vivo MRS and MRI measurements.
Results:
The signal model of Intralipid 20% emulsion used for phantoms was established for 3 T and 9.4 T fields. In all cases, we noticed a high coefficient of determination (R-squared) between MRS and MRI-PDFF measurements: in phantoms <0.9924-0.9990>; and in vivo <0.8069-0.9552>. Bland-Altman analysis was applied to phantom and in vivo measurements.
Discussion:
Multi-echo MRI in combination with an advanced algorithm including multi-peak spectrum modeling appears as a valuable and accurate method for low-level PDFF quantification over large FOV in high resolution, and is much faster than MRS methods. The graph-cut algorithm (GC) showed the fewest water/fat swaps in the PDFF maps, and hence stands out as the most robust method of those tested.
