# Intracellular enhancement technique for gadoxetic acid-enhanced hepatobiliary-phase magnetic resonance imaging: evaluation of hepatic function

## TL;DR

This study shows that a new imaging technique improves the accuracy of assessing liver function using magnetic resonance imaging.

## Contribution

The ICE technique enhances accuracy in evaluating hepatic function compared to conventional methods.

## Key findings

- The ICE technique improved liver/spleen contrast for differentiating Child-Pugh classes.
- The area under the curve for ICE was higher (0.81) than conventional methods (0.68).

## Abstract

To investigate the utility of intracellular enhancement (ICE) technique which suppresses signals from the extracellular space for the evaluation of hepatic function on gadoxetic acid-enhanced hepatobiliary-phase (HBP) images.

We subjected 67 patients with suspected neoplastic hepatic lesions to gadoxetic acid-enhanced HBP imaging with and without ICE [i-HBP, conventional-HBP (c-HBP)]. A radiologist calculated the liver/spleen contrast (LSC) [LSC = signal intensity (SI) of liver/SI of spleen]. Receiver-operating analysis was used to evaluate the diagnostic value of the LSC on i-HBP- (i-LSC) and c-HBP images (c-LSC) to differentiate between Child-Pugh classes A and B.

Of the 67 patients, 57 were in Child-Pugh class A and 10 were in class B. For their differentiation, the area under the curve value of i-LSC was higher than of c-LSC (0.81 vs. 0.68).

ICE technique can improve the accuracy of estimating hepatic function on HBP images.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00261-025-04817-y.