MR Phantom Validation of Adrenal Adenoma Signal Intensity Index Normalization

Cory R. Wyatt¹, Brian Dale², Elmar Merkle¹, James MacFall¹, Brian Soher¹

In-phase and-opposed phase chemical shift magnetic resonance imaging has been extensively used for differentiating between an adenoma and metastatic growth in the adrenal glands. However, due to the range of scan parameters used in these studies, the thresholds reported differ significantly. In this work, we present a method for normalizing signal intensity indices used to differentiate adrenal adenomas from metastases regardless of the clinical parameters used to acquire the IP/OP images. It was found that the method was able to correlate signal intensity index values to the true fat/water signal ratio for phantoms containing small amounts of fat.