The quantification and monitoring of body iron burden play a pivotal role in the clinical management of patients affected by inherited hemoglobin disorders, including thalassemia, hereditary hemochromatosis and sickle cell disease. The total amount of iron deposited in the organs well correlates with serum ferritin levels (expressed in ng/mL); however, serum ferritin lacks of specificity, since it may be affected by other factors such as fever or inflammation. Liver iron content (LIC),...

This retrospective observational study was performed on 15 thalassemic patients undergoing MRI examinations under chelation therapy and about fifty FerriScan TM -T2 and T2* MRI examinations were performed and compared. Exams were done with a 1.5T General Electric Hdx scanner using an eight-element cardiac/torso coil. Breath-hold T2*-MRI measurements were performed and the whole liver was scanned employing a multi-echo gradient echo sequence. T2-MRI measurements were performed with a...

The time evolution of liver iron content was analyzed and clinically discussed case-by-case for the patients which had at least one point outside the ±1 SD interval in the Bland-Altman plot. Although all T2* methods are in good agreement with the FerriScan TM results, the best accordance with LICdw deriving from FerriScan TM is reached by the measurement obtained from Quanta Hematology; the corresponding Bland-Altman analysis has mean of 0.1 mg/g and a standard deviation (SD) of 1.5 mg/g.

The good agreement observed between the T2* method and the goldstandard (FerriScan TM T2), makes suitable in our opinion the use of different commercial software for liver iron concentration monitoring in clinical routine. In our series of patients and measurements we observed two cases where FerriScan TM appeared to overestimate the LIC, particularly when the LIC had higher values. In these cases we don’t have a biopsy to allow direct quantification of LIC but we consider that FerriScan TM...

1. Wood et al., “MRI R2 and R2-star mapping accurately estimates hepatic iron concentration” (2005) 2. StPierre et al., “Noninvasive measurement and imaging of liver iron concentrations using proton magnetic resonance” (2005) 3. Meloni et al., “The use of appropriate calibration curves systematic differences in liver R2star values measured using different software packages” (2013) 4. Fernandes et al., “Heart and liver T2 assessment for iron overload using different software programs” (2011)...