Reliable, Repeatable, Reproducible: New Data Demonstrates Multiparametric MRI’s Ability to Characterise Liver Tissue

• Robust standardised metric key to evaluating treatment interventions in the clinical trial setting and monitoring of disease
• High precision in measuring liver fat, iron, and fibroinflammation reported by LiverMultiScan™

Oxford, UK, 10th April 2019. Data published in a medical research study demonstrated the technical performance of multiparametric MRI technology, LiverMultiScan™, to aid in the diagnosis of liver disorders. The findings showed high precision in measuring three key biomarkers of liver disease, iron, fibro-inflammation and fat, even when using different MRI scanner models and magnetic field strengths.

Liver disease is a global epidemic accompanied by an increasing demand for robust methods to assess the health of the liver, non-invasively. The most common diagnostic, liver biopsy, can be painful and unpleasant for patients and is limited by the small sample size and subjective assessment. Researchers at the University of Oxford, the University of Westminster and Perspectum Diagnostics have shown that effective assessment of the health of the liver can be done non-invasively using MRI-based imaging.

Professor Stefan Neubauer at the University of Oxford, comments that “As the rise in obesity and Type 2 diabetes perpetuates the liver disease epidemic, there is an urgent need for scalable, non-invasive solutions that benefit the management and diagnosis of patients with liver disease. This data demonstrates the reliability of measurements using LiverMultiScan and is particularly relevant for monitoring disease in clinical practice and assessing response to treatment in multi-site clinical trials.”

Multiparametric MRI is a non-invasive imaging method that can be completed in under 15-minutes and does not require any additional hardware. It was shown to be a robust tool to quantify liver tissue characteristics, which can give crucial visual and quantitative information to helps doctors monitor and evaluate liver health. This technology was tested across different magnetic field strengths, MRI manufacturers and scanner models, and it was found to produce consistent, quantitative results. Supporting the use of multiparametric MRI in liver disorder diagnosis, these findings may accelerate the shift towards non-invasive diagnostic technology.

The full paper can be accessed on the PLOS ONE website: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0214921