Rajakumar Nagarajan1, Manoj K. Sarma1,
Charles Hinkin2, Steven Castellon2, Jason P. Smith3,
Homayoon Khanlou4, Laveeza Bhatti4, Jonathan Truong5,
Ann B. Ragin6, Elyse Singer7, M Albert Thomas1
1Radiological Sciences, University of
California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States; 2Department
of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA School of Medicine and VA
Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, Los Angeles, CA, United States; 3Veteran's
Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare Center; 4AIDS Healthcare
Foundation, Westside Clinic, Los Angeles; 5Kaiser Permanente,
Lancaster CA; 6Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois, USA; 7Neurology,
UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California, United States
Hepatitis
C is a liver disease caused by the hepatitis C virus (HCV). HCV infection
sometimes results in an acute illness, but most often becomes a chronic
condition that can lead to cirrhosis of the liver and liver cancer. Hepatitis
C may be detectable with MR diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), which is
exquisitely sensitive to water diffusion and is used to quantify the
magnitude of diffusivity and the orientation and linearity (that is,
anisotropy) of water motility in microstructural level in brain. Combining
two-dimensional (2D) localized correlated spectroscopic (L-COSY) technique
with DTI provides more information about the cerebral metabolites, mean
diffusivity and fractional anisotropy changes in patients with hepatitis C.