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Clinical Article
MR texture analysis of paravertebral fat infiltration in patients with chronic low back pain based on IDEAL-IQ sequence
KANG Jing  ZHA Yunfei  LI Liang  LIU Changsheng  LIU Huan 

Cite this article as: Kang J, Zha YF, Li L, et al. MR texture analysis of paravertebral fat infiltration in patients with chronic low back pain based on IDEAL-IQ sequence[J]. Chin J Magn Reson Imaging, 2021, 12(10): 6-11. DOI:10.12015/issn.1674-8034.2021.10.002.


[Abstract] Objective To quantitatively evaluate how the fat infiltration degree of paravertebral muscles correlated with Goutallier grade in patients with chronic low back pain (LBP) by the iterative decomposition of water and fat with echo asymmetrical and least-squares estimation quantitation sequence (IDEAL-IQ), and to investigate the feasibility of MR texture analysis in evaluating paravertebral muscle fat infiltration based on fat fraction image. Materials andMethods Ninty-seven patients (50 males and 47 females) with LBP who underwent lumbar magnetic resonance examination were selected. The routine protocol included sagittal T2-weighted imaging (T2WI), axial T2WI and axial IDEAL-IQ sequence. The fat infiltration of paraspinal muscles in L1—S1 intervertebral disc (IVD), which were psoas major (PS), erector spinae (ES) and multifidus muscle (MF), was graded by T2WI-based Goutallier classification. Measured fat fraction (FF) and cross-sectional area (CSA) of paravertebral muscles by IDEAL-IQ sequence, obtained texture feature parameters based on fat fraction image. Between Goutallier classification groups, compared the difference of FF and CSA in paravertebral muscles by one-way analysis of variance. The relevance of the classification of Goutallier with FF and CSA was evaluated by adopting the analytic method of Spearman correlation. Receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) was used to evaluate the diagnostic efficiency of texture analysis parameters, and Spearman correlation was used to analyze the correlation between the texture parameters and FF.Results Between different Goutallier grade groups, there were significant differences in FF and CSA of paravertebral muscles fat infiltration in IVD. The Goutallier grade of MF and ES was significantly correlated with FF (the correlation coefficients were 0.753、0.819), while the Goutallier grade of PS was weakly correlated with FF (the correlation coefficient was 0.136). The Goutallier grade of ES, MF and PS was strongly, moderately and weakly correlated with CSA (correlation coefficients were -0.512, -0.338, -0.082, P<0.001). The texture feature parameters had a good diagnostic effect on the Goutallier grade of paravertebral muscles. Among these figures, meanvalue, Quantile 0.975 and Variance were significantly correlated with FF of paravertebral muscles (correlation coefficients were 0.887, 0.777, and 0.776), VoxelValueSum, kurtosis, skewness, uniformity, HaralickCorrelation_angle135_offset7, Haralick Correlation_angle90_offset4 and Inverse Difference Moment_AllDirection_offset4 showed a strong correlation with FF of paravertebral muscles (correlation coefficients were 0.609, -0.687, -0.569, 0.601, 0.633, 0.714, -0.604), Cluster Shade_AllDirection_offset 7 showed a moderate correlation with FF of paravertebral muscles (correlation coefficients were 0.497).Conclusions The Goutallier grade of lumbar paravertebral PS, ES and MF in patients with chronic low back pain were correlated with FF and CSA, and it was feasible to evaluate paravertebral fat infiltration by texture analysis based on IDEAL-IQ sequence fat fraction image.
[Keywords] chronic low back pain;texture analysis;fat infiltration;skeletal muscle;chemical shift magnetic resonance imaging

KANG Jing1   ZHA Yunfei1*   LI Liang1   LIU Changsheng1   LIU Huan2  

1 Department of Radiology, Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan 430060, China

2 Advanced Application Team, GE Healthcare, Shanghai 201203, China

Zha YF, E-mail: zhayunfei999@126.com

Conflicts of interest   None.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.81871332).
Received  2021-05-21
Accepted  2021-07-12
DOI: 10.12015/issn.1674-8034.2021.10.002
Cite this article as: Kang J, Zha YF, Li L, et al. MR texture analysis of paravertebral fat infiltration in patients with chronic low back pain based on IDEAL-IQ sequence[J]. Chin J Magn Reson Imaging, 2021, 12(10): 6-11. DOI:10.12015/issn.1674-8034.2021.10.002.

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