We aimed to investigate if diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI) can be applied to assess nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) by providing fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusion (MD) and mean kurtosis (MK). We used DKI derived parameters to analyze NAFLD in a rabbit model and compared them with the apparent-diffusion-coefficient (ADC) from a mono-exponential diffusion-weighted imaging model. While FA showed comparable results with the severity of NAFLD group, MD and MK indicated more robust performance in the diagnosis of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) compared with ADC. We therefore demonstrated that DKI had potential in stratifying NAFLD and early diagnosis of NASH.
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