A Comparison Study of Liver R2* Measurement in Pediatric Patients with Iron Overload

INTRODUCTION Iron overload is a common occurrence in children with thalassaemia major and sickle cell disease (due to frequent blood transfusions) or hereditary hemochromatosis. In this patient group, a non-invasive means to quantify iron is extremely attractive compared to conventional liver biopsy for determining total body iron. Recent advances in MRI have enabled non-invasive iron quantification [1,2] and a FDA-approved T2-based technique (FerriScan) is currently available as a surrogate to liver biopsy. However, more validation data is needed on children, and a very rapid T2*-based acquisition would be even more valuable as sedation could be avoided. In this study, we assess the accuracy of a T2*-based approach to quantify liver iron overload in children and compare a widely used constant offset model against other models for analyzing T2* data.