Towards Non-Invasive Diagnosis of NASH: Retrospective Fat Correction of MP2RAGE T1 Improves Correlation with Liver Fibrosis Stage

There is significant interest in non-invasive biomarkers for staging of liver fibrosis in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) to reduce the need for biopsy. T1 correlates with fibrosis but can also be influenced by fat, and while Dixon fat-water separation can remove this effect, such methods are uncommon in clinical T1 mapping sequences. In this work, we demonstrate a retrospective correction to estimate the T1 of liver tissue based on MP2RAGE without fat-water separation. This enables fat compensation in a wider range of acquisitions and improves the potential clinical utility of T1 as a biomarker for liver fibrosis.