In recent years, there has been increasing interest in non-invasive iron measurement, especially of the liver and heart, in patients with iron overload. Serum ferritin still remains an essential monitoring parameter in intervals between liver iron measurements; however, confounding factors such as inflammation, chelation treatment changes and the specific disease have to be taken into account. ...

Overview: In this lecture, I will provide an overview of the different available gadolinium-based contrast agents, with specific attention on dynamic contrast enhanced imaging and delayed hepatobiliary phase imaging. The dual blood supply of the liver will be reviewed and its importance on understanding the detection and characterization of focal liver lesions. The behavior of the dual blood su...

T he superb liver-to-lesion contrast of MRI and its ability to display the same lesion enhancement patterns as CT combined with its lack of ionizing radiation have led to this modality being widely accepted for assessing the broad spectrum of hepatic abnormalities. Moreover, hepatocyte-specific contrast agents are now available. The differential diagnosis of hypervascular hepatic lesions depend...

Radiol Bras. 2017 Jan/Fev;50(1):VII–VIII Chronic liver inflammation, which is responsible for various stages of parenchymal fibrosis and, especially end-stage liver disease (cirrhosis), is the main cause of hepatocarcinogenesis and therefore of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common primary malignant neoplasm of the liver. The causes of chronic liver inflammation include not only viral...

BACKGROUND Preoperative cardiovascular risk stratification in orthotopic liver transplantation candidates has proven challenging due to limitations of current noninvasive modalities. Additionally, the preoperative workup is logistically cumbersome and expensive given the need for separate cardiac, vascular, and abdominal imaging. We evaluated the feasibility of a "one-stop shop" in a magnetic r...

Objectives: The liver is a complex, multifunctional organ involved in a variety of critical processes. Accurate determination of liver function in children is difficult and current biomarkers often fail to truly assess functional capacity. Advances in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with hepatocyte-specific, gadolinium-based agents have enabled improved liver imaging. Since a functional hepato...

A 64-year-old male patient with liver cirrhosis underwent a CT study for hepatocellular carcinoma surveillance, which demonstrated a 1.4-cm hypervascular subcapsular tumor in the liver. On gadoxetic acid-enhanced MRI, the tumor showed brisk arterial enhancement and persistent hyperenhancement in the portal phase, but hypointensity in the hepatobiliary phase. On diffusion-weighted MRI, the tumor...

Liver fibrosis is a hallmark of chronic liver disease characterized by the excessive accumulation of extracellular matrix proteins. Although liver biopsy is the reference standard for diagnosis and staging of liver fibrosis, it has some limitations, including potential pain, sampling variability, and low patient acceptance. Hence, there has been an effort to develop noninvasive imaging techniqu...

Precise liver segmentation in abdominal MRI images is one of the most important steps for the computer-aided diagnosis of liver pathology. The first and essential step for diagnosis is automatic liver segmentation, and this process remains challenging. Extensive research has examined liver segmentation; however, it is challenging to distinguish which algorithm produces more precise segmentation...

BACKGROUND Frequent blood transfusion is often associated with iron overload. Proper use of iron chelators to treat iron overload requires an accurate measurement of iron levels. Magnetic resonance T2-star (T2* MRI) can measure iron level in the heart and liver. Our goal was to see whether an association exists between serum ferritin level and T2* MRI in patients with major beta thalassemia. ...