Evaluation of Chronic Pancreatitis With T₁ ρ MRI: A Preliminary Study

Chronic pancreatitis (CP) can result in persistent damage to the endocrine and exocrine tissues of the pancreas. There is an unmet need for quantitative methods to evaluate CP noninvasively.

To investigate the utility of T₁ ρ magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for the assessment of CP.

Prospective.

Twenty patients with CP and 24 healthy volunteers.

3T MRI including T₁ ρ sequence (spin lock time = 0, 1, 10, 20, 40, 60 msec).

Pancreatic T₁ ρ values and anterior-posterior (AP) diameters in the head, body, and tail were measured in all participants. Regions of interest with circle (ROI_circle ) and free-hand (ROI_FH ) were drawn for T₁ ρ value measurements.

Mann-Whitney U-test; Wilcoxon Signed Ranks test; receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve; and Bland-Altman analysis.

The T₁ ρ values of pancreatic tail and the mean T₁ ρ values for ROI_circle and the T₁ ρ values of pancreatic tail for ROI_FH in patients with CP were significantly higher than those in healthy volunteers (all P < 0.05). Pancreatic head AP diameter significantly increased, while pancreatic tail AP diameter significantly decreased in patients with CP compared with healthy volunteers (both P < 0.05). The areas under the ROC curves (AUCs) of pancreatic tail T₁ ρ values with ROI_circle and tail AP diameter in diagnosing CP were 0.744 and 0.798, respectively. A combination of pancreatic tail T₁ ρ values with ROI_circle and tail AP diameter achieved good performance for diagnosing CP (AUC = 0.838).

T₁ ρ MRI might be a potential technique for the noninvasive evaluation of CP. Level of Evidence 2 Technical Efficacy Stage 2 J. MAGN. RESON. IMAGING 2021;53:577-584.