An interesting approach for the diagnosis of hepatic fibrosis: Wáng et al., “A combined use of intravoxel incoherent motion MRI parameters can differentiate early-stage hepatitis-b fibrotic livers from healthy livers”

Since its description in 1986 by Le Bihan et al., intravoxel incoherent motion (IVIM) diffusion MR imaging has made great progresses (1-4). Many studies demonstrated the influence of various pathologies on the diffusion parameters especially in case of cirrhosis and fibrosis. However, few of them are useful at the individual level because of the variability of IVIM values (5). It is indeed very difficult to measure precisely PF and Dfast (6,7). Many published work tried to improve the precision of the measurements, tries to better understand the diffusion patterns, improve the image acquisition sequences or image post-processing. Unfortunately, till today, the reproducibility of the IVIM diffusion measures remain insufficient for daily clinical applications (5). Much progress remains to be made to achieve more reproducible results from one team to another or one scanner to another.