Assessment of Chronic Pancreatitis with MR Elastography

Yogesh Kannan Mariappan¹, Kevin Glaser¹, Naoki Takahashi¹, Phillip Young¹, Richard L. Ehman¹

Magnetic Resonance Elastography (MRE) is a phase-contrast MR elasticity imaging technique that can noninvasively measure the shear stiffness of soft tissues. The hypothesis of this work was that the stiffness of the pancreas in patients with pancreatitis is significantly different from the stiffness of healthy pancreas and that MRE can used to detect this difference. To test this hypothesis, an MRE acquisition was implemented to acquire multislice vector shear wave displacement data to measure the shear stiffness of the pancreas. This approach was applied to healthy subjects and to patients suspected of having pancreatic disease. Preliminary data obtained from this study indicates that the stiffness of the pancreas in patients with chronic pancreatitis is higher than in healthy volunteers.