Simultaneous assessment of liver volume and whole liver fat content: A step towards one-stop shop preoperative MRI protocol

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the ability of a whole liver volume (WLV) segmentation algorithm to measure fat fraction (FF). Methods: Twenty consecutive patients with histologically proven fatty liver disease underwent dual-echo in-phase/out-of-phase MRI and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) at 1.5 T. Two readers independently performed semiautomatic 3D liver segmentation on the out-of-phase sequences using an active contour model. FF was calculated for voxels, segments and WLV. Segmentation inter-observer reproducibility was assessed by intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) for WLV and FF. Fat fraction correlation and agreement as determined by histology, MRS and MRI were determined. Results: ICC was 0.999 (95% CI: 0.999-1, P∈