Citations

There is increasing scrutiny from healthcare organizations towards the utility and associated costs of imaging. MRI has traditionally been used as a high‐end modality, and although shown extremely important for many types of clinical scenarios, it has been suggested as too expensive by some. This editorial will try and explain how value should be addressed and gives some insights and practical examples of how value of MRI can be increased. It requires a global effort to increase accessibility, value for money, and impact on patient management. We hope this editorial sheds some light and gives some indications of where the field may wish to address some of its research to proactively demonstrate the value of MRI.Level of Evidence: 5Technical Efficacy: Stage 5J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2019;49:e14–e25.

Magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) is increasingly being applied to thin or small structures in which wave propagation is dominated by waveguide effects, which can substantially bias stiffness results with common processing approaches. The purpose of this work was to investigate the importance of such biases and artifacts on MRE inversion results in: (i) various idealized 2D and 3D geometries with one or more dimensions that are small relative to the shear wavelength; and (ii) a realistic cardiac geometry. Finite element models were created using simple 2D geometries as well as a simplified and a realistic 3D cardiac geometry, and simulated displacements acquired by MRE from harmonic excitations from 60 to 220 Hz across a range of frequencies. The displacement wave fields were inverted with direct inversion of the Helmholtz equation with and without the application of bandpass filtering and/or the curl operator to the displacement field. In all geometries considered, and at all frequencies considered, strong biases and artifacts were present in inversion results when the curl operator was not applied. Bandpass filtering without the curl was not sufficient to yield accurate recovery. In the 3D geometries, strong biases and artifacts were present in 2D inversions even when the curl was applied, while only 3D inversions with application of the curl yielded accurate recovery of the complex shear modulus. These results establish that taking the curl of the wave field and performing a full 3D inversion are both necessary steps for accurate estimation of the shear modulus both in simple thin‐walled or small structures and in a realistic cardiac geometry when using simple inversions that neglect the hydrostatic pressure term. In practice, sufficient wave amplitude, signal‐to‐noise ratio, and resolution will be required to achieve accurate results.

Objective: To evaluate the effect of hepatic steatosis on LI-RADS® major features at MRI in patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD)-associated hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Methods: HCC and liver parenchyma features at MRI from 48 consecutive patients with NAFLD and histology proven HCC (mean ± SD; 4.5 ± 3.4 cm) were independently reviewed by three radiologists. Inter-rater agreement was determined by prevalence/bias-adjusted kappa. Hepatic fat signal fraction (FS%) was independently calculated. HCC features were compared by FS% at MRI using logistic regression analysis and histologic steatosis grade using Cochran-Armitage test for trend, stratified by cirrhotic liver morphology or histologic fibrosis stage. Receiver operating characteristic curves were generated to determine the sensitivity and specificity for major HCC features by FS%. Results: Major HCC features included arterial phase hyperenhancement (APHE) in 45 (93%), portal venous phase washout (PVWO) in 30 (63%), delayed phase washout (DPWO) in 38 (79%) and enhancing “capsule” in 34 (71%). Cirrhotic morphology was present in 22 (46%). Inter-rater agreement was 0.75 for APHE, 0.42–0.58 for PVWO, 0.58–0.71 for DPWO and 0.38–0.67 for enhancing “capsule”. There was an 18%, 14% and 22% increase in the odds of absent PVWO, DPWO and capsule appearance for every 1% increase in hepatic FS% in patients with non-cirrhotic liver morphology (p = 0.011, 0.040 and 0.029, respectively). Hepatic FS% ≥ 14.8% had a sensitivity and specificity of 64 and 100% for absent PVWO and 71 and 90% for absent DPWO in patients with non-cirrhotic liver morphology. Conclusion: Absent washout and capsule appearance are associated with increasing hepatic steatosis in patients with non-cirrhotic, NAFLD-associated HCC. Advances in knowledge: In patients with non-cirrhotic, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD)-associated hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), absent HCC washout and capsule appearance are associated with increasing hepatic steatosis, thereby potentially impacting the noninvasive imaging diagnosis of HCC in these patients. Lack of washout or capsule appearance in steatotic livers at MRI may require alternative criteria for the diagnosis of HCC in patients with non-cirrhotic NAFLD.

PurposeTo introduce newly developed MR elastography (MRE)‐based dual‐saturation imaging and dual‐sensitivity motion encoding schemes to directly measure in vivo skull–brain motion, and to study the skull–brain coupling in volunteers with these approaches.MethodsSix volunteers were scanned with a high‐performance compact 3T‐MRI scanner. The skull–brain MRE images were obtained with a dual‐saturation imaging where the skull and brain motion were acquired with fat‐ and water‐suppression scans, respectively. A dual‐sensitivity motion encoding scheme was applied to estimate the heavily wrapped phase in skull by the simultaneous acquisition of both low‐ and high‐sensitivity phase during a single MRE exam. The low‐sensitivity phase was used to guide unwrapping of the high‐sensitivity phase. The amplitude and temporal phase delay of the rigid‐body motion between the skull and brain was measured, and the skull–brain interface was visualized by slip interface imaging (SII).ResultsBoth skull and brain motion can be successfully acquired and unwrapped. The skull–brain motion analysis demonstrated the motion transmission from the skull to the brain is attenuated in amplitude and delayed. However, this attenuation (%) and delay (rad) were considerably greater with rotation (59 ± 7%, 0.68 ± 0.14 rad) than with translation (92 ± 5%, 0.04 ± 0.02 rad). With SII the skull–brain slip interface was not completely evident, and the slip pattern was spatially heterogeneous.ConclusionThis study provides a framework for acquiring in vivo voxel‐based skull and brain displacement using MRE that can be used to characterize the skull–brain coupling system for understanding of mechanical brain protection mechanisms, which has potential to facilitate risk management for future injury.

Magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) is an imaging technology that has been available as an FDA-cleared upgrade to MRI systems since 2009. Worldwide, MRE technology has been installed on approximately 1000 MRI systems. In October 2017, the AMA approved the creation of a CPT code for MRE. In MRE, propagating shear waves in the range of 30–300 Hz are generated in tissue, and imaged with a phase contrast MRI technique. The wave images are processed with an inversion algorithm to generate cross-sectional images quantitatively depicting the complex shear modulus of tissue. The main application of MRE is currently in noninvasive diagnosis of chronic liver disease. Published studies have established the MRE is the most accurate and technically successful non-invasive modality for diagnosing liver fibrosis. Many other promising applications of MRE are being explored by investigators around the world, including assessment of diseases of the brain, heart, lung, and muscle and tumors of breast, liver, prostate, liver, and other organs. The new applications that closest adoption in clinical practice are (1) assessment of brain disease and (2) advanced diagnosis of liver disease. These new applications require acquisition sequences and processing algorithms that are more advanced than the current product MRE techniques.

PurposeTo implement a reduced field of view (rFOV) technique for cardiac MR elastography (MRE) and to demonstrate the improvement in image quality of both magnitude images and post‐processed MRE stiffness maps compared to the conventional full field of view (full‐FOV) acquisition.MethodsWith Institutional Review Board approval, 17 healthy volunteers underwent both full‐FOV and rFOV cardiac MRE scans using 140‐Hz vibrations. Two cardiac radiologists blindly compared the magnitude images and stiffness maps and graded the images based on several image quality attributes using a 5‐point ordinal scale. Fisher's combined probability test was performed to assess the overall evaluation. The octahedral shear strain‐based signal‐to‐noise ratio (OSS‐SNR) and median stiffness over the left ventricular myocardium were also compared.ResultsOne volunteer was excluded because of an inconsistent imaging resolution during the exam. In the remaining 16 volunteers (9 males, 7 females), the rFOV scans outperformed the full‐FOV scans in terms of subjective image quality and ghosting artifacts in the magnitude images and stiffness maps, as well as the overall preference. The quantitative measurements showed that rFOV had significantly higher OSS‐SNR (median: 1.4 [95% confidence interval (CI): 1.2–1.5] vs. 2.1 [95% CI: 1.8–2.4]), P < 0.05) compared to full‐FOV. Although no significant change was found in the median myocardial stiffness between the 2 scans, we observed a decrease in the stiffness variation within the myocardium from 2.1 kPa (95% CI: [1.9, 2.3]) to 1.9 kPa (95% CI: [1.7, 2.0]) for full‐FOV and rFOV, respectively (P < 0.05) in a subgroup of 7 subjects with ghosting present in the myocardium.ConclusionThis pilot volunteer study demonstrated that rFOV cardiac MRE has the capability to reduce ghosting and to improve image quality in both MRE magnitude images and stiffness maps. Magn Reson Med 80:231–238, 2018. © 2017 The Authors Magnetic Resonance in Medicine published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

PurposeTo investigate the feasibility of using artificial neural networks to estimate stiffness from MR elastography (MRE) data.MethodsArtificial neural networks were fit using model‐based training patterns to estimate stiffness from images of displacement using a patch size of ∼1 cm in each dimension. These neural network inversions (NNIs) were then evaluated in a set of simulation experiments designed to investigate the effects of wave interference and noise on NNI accuracy. NNI was also tested in vivo, comparing NNI results against currently used methods.ResultsIn 4 simulation experiments, NNI performed as well or better than direct inversion (DI) for predicting the known stiffness of the data. Summary NNI results were also shown to be significantly correlated with DI results in the liver (R2 = 0.974) and in the brain (R2 = 0.915), and also correlated with established biological effects including fibrosis stage in the liver and age in the brain. Finally, repeatability error was lower in the brain using NNI compared to DI, and voxel‐wise modeling using NNI stiffness maps detected larger effects than using DI maps with similar levels of smoothing.ConclusionArtificial neural networks represent a new approach to inversion of MRE data. Summary results from NNI and DI are highly correlated and both are capable of detecting biologically relevant signals. Preliminary evidence suggests that NNI stiffness estimates may be more resistant to noise than an algebraic DI approach. Taken together, these results merit future investigation into NNIs to improve the estimation of stiffness in small regions. Magn Reson Med 80:351–360, 2018. © 2017 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.

PurposeTo assess the success rate, image quality, and the ability to stage liver fibrosis of a standard 2D gradient‐recalled echo (GRE) and four different spin‐echo (SE) magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) sequences in patients with different liver iron concentrations.Materials and MethodsA total of 332 patients who underwent 3T MRE examinations that included liver fat and iron quantification were enrolled, including 136 patients with all five MRE techniques. Thirty‐four patients had biopsy results for fibrosis staging. The liver stiffness, region of interest area, image quality, and success rate of the five sequences were compared in 115/136 patients. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUCs) and the accuracies for diagnosing early‐stage fibrosis and advanced fibrosis were compared. The effect of BMI (body mass index), the R2* relaxation time, and fat fraction on the image quality and liver stiffness measurements were analyzed.ResultsThe success rates were significantly higher in the four SE sequences (99.1–100%) compared with GRE MRE (85.3%) (all P < 0.001). There were significant differences of the mean ROI area between every pair of sequences (all P < 0.0001). There were no significant differences in the AUC of the five MRE sequences for discriminating advanced fibrosis (10 P‐values ranging from 0.2410–0.9171). R2* had a significant effect on the success rate and image quality for the noniron 2D echo‐planar imaging (EPI), 3D EPI and 2D GRE (all P < 0.001) sequences. BMI had a significant effect on the iron 2D EPI (P = 0.0230) and iron 2D SE (P = 0.0040) sequences.ConclusionAll five techniques showed good diagnostic performance in staging liver fibrosis. The SE MRE sequences had higher success rates and better image quality than GRE MRE in 3T clinical hepatic imaging.Level of Evidence: 3Technical Efficacy: Stage 5J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2018;47:976–987.