Simultaneous MR quantification of hepatic fat content, fatty acid composition, transverse relaxation time and magnetic susceptibility for the diagnosis of non‐alcoholic steatohepatitis

Non‐alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is characterized at histology by steatosis, hepatocyte ballooning and inflammatory infiltrates, with or without fibrosis. Although diamagnetic material in fibrosis and inflammation can be detected with quantitative susceptibility imaging, fatty acid composition changes in NASH relative to simple steatosis have also been reported. Therefore, our aim was to develop a single magnetic resonance (MR) acquisition and post‐processing scheme for the diagnosis of steatohepatitis by the simultaneous quantification of hepatic fat content, fatty acid composition, T2* transverse relaxation time and magnetic susceptibility in patients with non‐alcoholic fatty liver disease. MR acquisition was performed at 3.0 T using a three‐dimensional, multi‐echo, spoiled gradient echo sequence. Phase images were unwrapped to compute the B0 field inhomogeneity (ΔB0) map. The ΔB0‐demodulated real part images were used for fat–water separation, T2* and fatty acid composition quantification. The external and internal fields were separated with the projection onto dipole field method. Susceptibility maps were obtained after dipole inversion from the internal field map with single‐orientation Bayesian regularization including spatial priors. Method validation was performed in 32 patients with biopsy‐proven, non‐alcoholic fatty liver disease from which 12 had simple steatosis and 20 NASH. Liver fat fraction and T2* did not change significantly between patients with simple steatosis and NASH. In contrast, the saturated fatty acid fraction increased in patients with NASH relative to patients with simple steatosis (48 ± 2% versus 44 ± 4%; p