Quantification of Hemosiderin Deposition in Hemophilic Arthropathy Using Ultrashort Echo Time Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (UTE-QSM)

We investigated the quantitative capability of the UTE-QSM technique in the assessment of hemosiderin compared to histology. UTE-QSM and histology were performed in knee synovium tissues from hemophilia patients to visualize hemosiderin. The susceptibility maps from UTE-QSM showed a visually high similarity to the corresponding histological findings for all tissues. There was a significant difference in tissues with low and high iron load (p<0.001) in UTE-QSM. The susceptibility values on UTE-QSM showed a significant strong positive correlation to the blue signal in histology (R=0.908; p<0.001). We showed that UTE-QSM has excellent performance for detecting and quantifying hemosiderin in HA.