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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2017 Nov 1.
Published in final edited form as: J Hepatol. 2016 Jun 14;65(5):1006–1016. doi: 10.1016/j.jhep.2016.06.005

Figure 1. Principles of MRI-PDFF assessment and quantification of hepatic steatosis.

Figure 1

Moving left to right in the figure, you will first find the complex method of estimating PDFF, which acquires real and imaginary images to generate a PDFF map from 0–100%, labeled “C-MRI PDFF” here. Next are the magnitude images which are squared to generate a PDFF map from 0–50%, labeled “M-MRI PDFF” here. Both techniques acquire multiple images at echo times optimally spaced for fat water separation and T2* signal decay correction, and both apply a multi peak spectral model to correct for multi-frequency interference effects of fat proton signals. Note that for magnitude based PDFF, the calculated image only has a range of 0 to 50%. This is within the typical biological limits of liver fat content.