Correction of heat-induced susceptibility changes in respiratory-triggered 2D-PRF-based thermometry for monitoring of magnetic resonance-guided hepatic microwave ablation in a human-like porcine model.

Purpose: To develop and evaluate susceptibility corrected 2D proton resonance frequency (PRF)-based magnetic resonance (MR)-thermometry for the accurate assessment of the ablation zone of hepatic microwave ablation (MWA).

Methods And Materials: Twelve hepatic MWA were performed in five LEWE minipigs with human-like fissure-free liver. Temperature maps during ablation of PRF-based MR-thermometry were corrected by modeling heat induced susceptibility changes. Ablation zones were determined using cumulative equivalent minutes at 43 °C (CEM43) as tissue damage model. T1 weighted (w) post-ablation contrast-enhanced (CE) MR-imaging and manually segmented postmortem histology were used for validation. The agreement of uncorrected (raw) and susceptibility corrected (corr) MR-thermometry with T1w post-ablation CE MR-imaging and histology was evaluated. The Wilcoxon-signed rank test and Bland-Altman analysis were applied.

Results: With the susceptibility corrected MR-thermometry a significantly increased dice coefficient (raw: 77% vs. corr: 83%,  < 0.01) and sensitivity (raw: 72% vs. corr: 82%,  < 0.01) was found for the comparison to T1w-CE imaging as well as histopathology (dice coefficients: raw: 76% vs. corr: 79%,  < 0.001; sensitivity: raw: 72% vs. corr: 74%,  < 0.001). While major axis length was significantly increased (7.1 mm,  < 0.001) and minor axis length significantly decreased (2.2 mm,  < 0.001) in uncorrected MR-thermometry compared to T1w-CE MR-imaging, no significant bias was found after susceptibility correction.

Conclusion: Using susceptibility corrected 2D PRF-based MR-thermometry to predict the ablation zones of hepatic MWA provided a good agreement in comparison to T1w post-ablation CE MR-imaging and histopathology.