Assessment Of Iron Deposition In Human Body By Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging Method

Using MRI quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) and T2*methods, the thesisevaluated liver, heart and brain iron content in thalassaemia patients, and analyzed thecorrelation between the organs iron content and body iron content. Moreover, the thesisconducts the research on whether the iron content has any correlation with the ages ofthalassaemia patients, and compares the two methods, about their feasibility of iron depositionimaging. In the thesis, thirty-three thalassaemia patients underwent gradient echo sequencewhole-brain scan on the1.5MR scanner system, the organs iron content was calculated usinga lot of post-processing method in order to do the relative research. In both images acquiredusing QSM and T2*methods, the distribution of iron in the organs can clearly be detected.The study found out that T2*is the better method to detect the iron content in heart and liverbecause it was fast and insensitive to motion artifacts, but compared with T2*method QSMcan quantify the brain iron content quickly and accurately. Furthermore, the iron content inliver, heart and brain was significantly linear correlated with body iron content, but nocorrelated with the ages of thalassaemia patients, and the iron content in liver and heart wassignificantly linear correlated with brain iron content. In conclusion both magnetic sensitivequantitative imaging method and T2*method can be very effective in routine non-invasiveassessment of tissue components, especially for iron, different organs using different methodsor using the both will be helpful for prevention or early diagnosis and treatment in clinical,that is very important for the assessment of thalassemia patients.