Motivation: Hepatic fat fraction (FF) can be non-invasively measured using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to assess non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Manual region of interest placement (ROI) is time-consuming and potentially inaccurate if liver lobes are not sampled evenly. Goal(s): The purpose of this work was to compare the FF obtained automatically and semi-automatically to those measured manually. Approach: Liver segmentations were automatically generated and manually corrected. FF was measured using manually placed ROIs in the liver, automatically from liver segmentation without corrections, and semi-automatically from manually corrected automatic liver segmentations. Results: FF from the three methods were strongly correlated and had excellent agreement. Impact: Hepatic fat fraction from MRI can non-invasively stage the degree of hepatic steatosis for NAFLD evaluation. Automatic fat fraction measurement is more efficient than manual approaches, making it more suitable for clinical workflows.
Mahalingam et al. (Tue,) studied this question.