Non-Invasive Assessment of Hepatic Fibrosis by Elastic Measurement of Liver Using Magnetic Resonance Tagging Images

To date, the measurement of the stiffness of liver requires a special vibrational tool that limits its application in many hospitals. In this study, we developed a novel method for automatically assessing the elasticity of the liver without any use of contrast agents or mechanical devices. By calculating the non-rigid deformation of the liver from magnetic resonance (MR) tagging images, the stiffness was quantified as the displacement of grids on the liver image during a forced exhalation cycle. Our methods include two major processes: (1) quantification of the non-rigid deformation as the bending energy (BE) based on the thin-plate spline method in the spatial domain and (2) calculation of the difference in the power spectrum from the tagging images, by using fast Fourier transform in the frequency domain. By considering 34 cases (17 normal and 17 abnormal liver cases), a remarkable difference between the two groups was found by both methods. The elasticity of the liver was finally analyzed by combining the bending energy and power spectral features obtained through MR tagging images. The result showed that only one abnormal case was misclassified in our dataset, which implied our method for non-invasive assessment of liver fibrosis has the potential to reduce the traditional liver biopsy.