Table 1.

Diagnostic accuracy of MRI-PDFF for grading hepatic steatosis

	Design	Patient Characteristics	Reference Standard	MRI-PDFF cut-off	Accuracy/Correlation
Permutt et al.29	Cross-sectional, prospective cohort	51 adult; biopsy proven NAFLD; AST/ALT above ULN; no alternative etiology	Liver biopsy NASH- CRN histology; single blinded liver pathologist	Grade 1: 8.9% Grade 2: 16.3% Grade 3: 25%	r2 =0.56; patients with stage 4 fibrosis had lower quantified steatosis
Tang et al.53	Cross-sectional, prospective cohort	77 adult and pediatric; biopsy proven NAFLD; no alternative etiology	Liver biopsy NASH- CRN histology; blinded liver pathologist	Grade 1: 6.4% Grade 2: 17.4% Grade 3: 22.1%	AUC 0.989 grade 1; AUC 0.825 ≥ grade 2; AUC 0.893 ≥ grade 3
Idilman et al.56	Retrospective, cohort	70 adult; biopsy proven NAFLD; no alternative etiology	Liver biopsy NASH- CRN histology; blinded liver pathologist	Grade 2/3: 15%	AUC 0.950 ≥ grade 2; correlation decreased when fibrosis present
Bannas et al.57	Cross-sectional, prospective cohort	13 liver donors where livers were deemed unsuitable for transplant	Five core biopsies from 9 segments (45 cores per liver); NASH-CRN histology; 2 blinded liver pathologists	n/a	Strong correlation with histology (r2=0.850), smaller variance for MRI-PDFF than for histologic steatosis
Heba ER et al.58	Retrospective, cohort	506 adult; biopsy proven or suspected NAFLD; no alternative etiology	Right lobe magnetic resonance spectroscopy	n/a	2-D echo least accurate, 3-D echo most accurate, results influenced by BMI and gender (males)

NAFLD: non-alcoholic fatty liver disease; NASH: non-alcoholic steatohepatitis; AUC: area under the curve; r² = correlation coefficient