Abstract

To validate QSM-based biomagnetic liver susceptometry (BLS) to measure liver iron overload at 1.5?T and 3.0?T using superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUID)-based BLS as reference.Subjects with known or suspected iron overload were recruited for QSM-BLS at 1.5?T and 3.0?T using eight different protocols. SQUID-BLS was also obtained in each subject to provide susceptibility reference. A recent QSM method based on data-adaptive regularization was used to obtain susceptibility and R 2 * $$ {\mathrm{R}}_2^{\ast } $$ maps. Measurements of susceptibility and R 2 * $$ {\mathrm{R}}_2^{\ast } $$ were obtained in the right liver lobe. Linear mixed-effects analysis was used to estimate the contribution of specific acquisition parameters to QSM-BLS. Linear regression and Bland-Altman analyses were used to assess the relationship between QSM-BLS and SQUID-BLS/ R 2 * $$ {\mathrm{R}}_2^{\ast } $$ .Susceptibility maps showed high subjective quality for each acquisition protocol across different iron levels. High linear correlation was observed between QSM-BLS and SQUID-BLS at 1.5?T (r2 range, [0.82, 0.84]) and 3.0?T (r2 range, [0.77, 0.85]) across different acquisition protocols. QSM-BLS and R 2 * $$ {\mathrm{R}}_2^{\ast } $$ were highly correlated at both field strengths (r2 range at 1.5?T, [0.94, 0.99]; 3.0?T, [0.93, 0.99]). High correlation (r2  = 0.99) between 1.5?T and 3.0?T QSM-BLS, with narrow reproducibility coefficients (range, [0.13, 0.21] ppm) were observed for each protocol.This work evaluated the feasibility and performance of liver QSM-BLS across iron levels and acquisition protocols at 1.5?T and 3.0?T. High correlation and reproducibility were observed between QSM-BLS and SQUID-BLS across protocols and field strengths. In summary, QSM-BLS may enable reliable and reproducible quantification of liver iron concentration.

View details for DOI 10.1002/mrm.29529

View details for PubMedID 36408802