Image quality and evaluation ability of magnetic resonance imaging techniques for thyroid-associated ophthalmopathy: Dixon fat-suppression technique vs. spectral attenuated inversion recovery

• Published in: Frontiers in medicine 2023-07, Vol.10, p.1154828-1154828
• Main Authors: Huang, Kai, Lin, Xiaoxin, Luo, Yaosheng, Hu, Qiugen, Guo, Baoliang, Ouyang, Fusheng, Ouyang, Yufeng, Song, Cheng, Chen, Haixiong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Dixon fat-suppression; image quality; lesion; Medicine; MRI; spectral attenuated inversion recovery; thyroid-associated ophthalmopathy
• ISSN: 2296-858X; 2296-858X
• DOI: 10.3389/fmed.2023.1154828

We aimed to compare two magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques, Dixon and spectral attenuated inversion recovery (SPAIR) fat-suppression, in terms of image quality and suitability for evaluating thyroid-associated ophthalmopathy (TAO) lesion characteristics. This cross-sectional, retrospective study involved 70 patients with TAO (140 eyes) who underwent orbital coronal MRI examinations, including Dixon-transverse relaxation (T2)-weighted imaging (T2WI) and SPAIR-T2WI, between 2020 and 2022. We compared the fat-suppression quality and artifacts, noise (N), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), signal intensity ratio (SIR) of extraocular muscles (SIR-EOM) and lacrimal glands (SIR-LG), and TAO activity evaluation efficiency. Dixon-T2WI showed a higher frequency of better subjective image quality and suitability for evaluating the characteristics of TAO lesions (65.7% vs. 14.3%) than SPAIR-T2WI. Fat-suppression quality and artifact scores were lower for Dixon-T2WI than for SPAIR-T2WI (  0.001). The N, SNR, and CNR values, EOM-SIR, and LG-SIR were higher for orbital coronal Dixon-T2WI than for SPAIR-T2WI (all