Non-alcoholic fatty liver (NAFLD) is currently considered a major public health problem worldwide, being one of the most common causes of liver disease in the West, affecting 20-40% of the adult population. Obesity, Type II diabetes mellitus and dyslipidemia, in the absence of alcohol consumption, are the most important risk factors for non-alcoholic fatty liver, revealed by a series of epidemiological studies that independently showed a strong relationship between each of these factors and disease. [1,2] Non-alcoholic fatty liver comprises several clinical entities, starting from...

Initially, 33 patientshad their liver qualitatively assessed using using lab test and ultrasound liver examination. The patientunderwent a 3T high resolution MRI which included T1 weighted sequences with in-phase, out-of-phase and fat specific phases, T2-weighted and spectroscopy sequences. The qualitative assessement was made using the Fat-Fraction calculated manually after spectroscopy computer analysis. Fat-Fraction = Lipid area/(Lipid area + H2O area) x 100 25 patients were surgically treated fora different pathology and a liver biopsy was sampled and histologically analysed. The steathosis was graded as follows:...

Five patients had grade 0 steatosis, thirteen patients had grade 1, six patients grade 2 and one patient grade 3, with a good correlation with MRS and pathology. This is a preliminary study limited by the small number of patients and the invasiveness of surgical liver biopsy.

Although this study is a pilot study conducted in our imaging department, research centre of gastroenterology and hepatology, we can conclude that MR spectroscopy is an effective, noninvasive technique that can be very useful to diagnose and quantify hepatic steatosis.

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