Diego Hernando1, Jens-Peter Khn1, 2, Scott B. Reeder1, 3
1Department of Radiology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States; 2Department of Diagnostic Radiology, University Greifswald, Greifswald, MV, Germany; 3Department of Medical Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States
R2*-MRI can be used to assess body iron deposition for diagnosis, staging and treatment monitoring of iron overload. However, the apparent R2* is often confounded by the presence of fat, noise floor and susceptibility effects (e.g., near tissue/air interfaces). Recently, a method was introduced to perform fat-corrected, complex-fitting, and susceptibility-corrected R2* mapping. In this work, we quantitatively evaluate the susceptibility correction in a cohort of 35 healthy subjects without iron overload. Uncorrected measurements showed significant deviations in R2*. These deviations were largely corrected by susceptibility-corrected R2*. This technique may be important for the assessment of iron deposition in the liver.