Korean J Radiol.  2022 Dec;23(12):1260-1268. 10.3348/kjr.2022.0334.

Cutoff Values for Diagnosing Hepatic Steatosis Using Contemporary MRI-Proton Density Fat Fraction Measuring Methods

Affiliations
  • 1Department of Radiology and Research Institute of Radiology, University of Ulsan College of Medicine, Asan Medical Center, Seoul, Korea
  • 2Department of Surgery, Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital, Anyang, Korea
  • 3Department of Radiology, Hanyang University Guri Hospital, Hanyang University College of Medicine, Guri, Korea
  • 4University of Ulsan College of Medicine, Asan Medical Center, Seoul, Korea
  • 5Department of Radiology, National Cancer Center, Goyang, Korea
  • 6Department of Gastroenterology, Asan Liver Center, Asan Medical Center, University of Ulsan College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea
  • 7Department of Surgery, Division of Hepatobiliary and Liver Transplantation Surgery, Asan Medical Center, University of Ulsan College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea

Abstract


Objective
To propose standardized MRI-proton density fat fraction (PDFF) cutoff values for diagnosing hepatic steatosis, evaluated using contemporary PDFF measuring methods in a large population of healthy adults, using histologic fat fraction (HFF) as the reference standard.
Materials and Methods
A retrospective search of electronic medical records between 2015 and 2018 identified 1063 adult donor candidates for liver transplantation who had undergone liver MRI and liver biopsy within a 7-day interval. Patients with a history of liver disease or significant alcohol consumption were excluded. Chemical shift imaging-based MRI (CS-MRI) PDFF and high-speed T2-corrected multi-echo MR spectroscopy (HISTO-MRS) PDFF data were obtained. By temporal splitting, the total population was divided into development and validation sets. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was performed to evaluate the diagnostic performance of the MRI-PDFF method. Two cutoff values with sensitivity > 90% and specificity > 90% were selected to rule-out and rule-in, respectively, hepatic steatosis with reference to HFF ≥ 5% in the development set. The diagnostic performance was assessed using the validation set.
Results
Of 921 final participants (624 male; mean age ± standard deviation, 31.5 ± 9.0 years), the development and validation sets comprised 497 and 424 patients, respectively. In the development set, the areas under the ROC curve for diagnosing hepatic steatosis were 0.920 for CS-MRI-PDFF and 0.915 for HISTO-MRS-PDFF. For ruling-out hepatic steatosis, the CS-MRI-PDFF cutoff was 2.3% (sensitivity, 92.4%; specificity, 63.0%) and the HISTO-MRI-PDFF cutoff was 2.6% (sensitivity, 88.8%; specificity, 70.1%). For ruling-in hepatic steatosis, the CS-MRI-PDFF cutoff was 3.5% (sensitivity, 73.5%; specificity, 88.6%) and the HISTO-MRI-PDFF cutoff was 4.0% (sensitivity, 74.7%; specificity, 90.6%).
Conclusion
In a large population of healthy adults, our study suggests diagnostic thresholds for ruling-out and ruling-in hepatic steatosis defined as HFF ≥ 5% by contemporary PDFF measurement methods.

Keyword

Proton density fat fraction; Chemical shift imaging-based magnetic resonance imaging; High-speed T2-corrected multi-echo magnetic resonance spectroscopy; Hepatic steatosis; Threshold value
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