| Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 醫學工程學研究所 === 105 === In thalassemia patients, lifelong blood transfusion leads to iron overload in vital organs. Excess iron are mainly stored in the liver. The estimation of iron by atomic absorption spectroscopy in liver biopsy is the gold standard for the assessment of iron overload. In the last decade MR has been developed to replace liver biopsy and serve as an alternative non-invasive method for quantification of liver iron. However, traditional multiple spin-echo sequence has the disadvantage of long scanning time. Therefore, we proposed a new breath-hold multi-echo multi-planar spin echo (BHMEMPSE) sequence, which only takes 4 minutes in human study, to assess liver iron content.
In the first part, we scanned the calibrated iron solution phantom with MEMPSE, BHMEMPSE and gradient-echo sequences. These three sequences demonstrated linear trend of R2/R2* against different concentrations of iron solution, in the range of 0.01 ~ 0.5 mg Fe/g FeCl3 solution. This range corresponds to R2/R2* range of 3 ~ 220 1/s, which is wide enough for routine clinical use. We also determined that mono-exponential curve fitting model was the best one, which was more practical for clinical use.
In the second part, we demonstrated the excellent linear relationship of the BHMEMPSE sequence to the MEMPSE sequence in human study. Although the anatomic details of the BHMEMPSE images were vaguely seen, drawing a circular region of interest within the liver for R2 measurement was feasible.
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