hepatic steatosis, acoustic structure quantification, magnetic resonance spectroscopy, monitoring hepatic steatosis, Medical technology, R855-855.5

Purpose The purpose of this study was to prospectively evaluate whether monitoring hepatic steatosis by ultrasonography with acoustic structure quantification (ASQ) is feasible, using magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) as the reference standard. Methods Thirty-six patients with suspected fatty liver disease underwent both untrasonography with ASQ and MRS on the same day. After a mean follow-up period of 11.4±2.5 months, follow-up ultrasonography with ASQ and MRS were performed on 27 patients to evaluate whether hepatic steatosis had improved. The focal disturbance (FD) ratio, as calculated using ASQ, and the hepatic fat fraction (HFF), estimated by MRS, were obtained at both initial and follow-up examinations. Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated to assess the correlations between ordinal values. Results The FD ratio showed a strong, negative linear correlation with the HFF after logarithmic transformation of both variables from the initial examinations of 36 patients (ρ=-0.888, P