Award or Grant: R21 DK090690-01A1, National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Liver fibrosis and its most advanced stage, cirrhosis, are consequences of chronic and acute hepatic disease. Fibrosis leads to a loss of liver function, and both regional and global perfusion changes. Currently, the gold standard for assessing fibrosis is liver biopsy, which is an invasive technique. The long-term goal is to develop a robust and accurate non-invasive method for detecting and staging liver fibrosis and cirrhosis.
Relevance: This would present a first step toward a non-invasive method for the detection and staging of liver fibrosis. It would reduce the reliance on liver biopsy for the diagnosis and monitoring of chronic liver disease, whose burden on the public health system is expected to increase in the next decade.
Techniques used: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) acquisition, reconstruction and post-processing, MRI pulse sequence development, accelerated imaging, biophysical modeling, quantitative susceptibility mapping, MRI relaxation rate mapping, dynamic contrast enhanced imaging, liver biopsy, treatment response measurement, clinical research