Perspectum Diagnostics is an Oxford, UK based company founded in 2012, in partnership with the University of Oxford, that delivers digital technologies to help clinicians provide better care for patients with liver disease. Their vision is to empower patients and clinicians through greater understanding of liver disease, enabling early detection, diagnosis and targeted treatment.
According to the company, corrected T1 (cT1) is a Magnetic Resonance (MR) relaxation parameter. It is an emerging biomarker for rapid quantification of hepatic fibro-inflammatory disease. It is essentially a surrogate marker for free water in a tissue. Free water (T1) increases with fibrosis and inflammation. T1 is also increased by the presence of iron and this must be corrected for in the analysis inflammation (free water), hence cT1. The measure cT1 can be compared across different Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) systems and sites.
A new study with senior author Mukesh Harisinghani of the Division of Abdominal Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA, was published in the journal of Abdominal Radiology and involved over 2,800 subjects from the UK BioBank MRI imaging dataset, one of the largest available in the world. The paper revealed a tight distribution of cT1 values in a sub-population at low risk for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. In comparison, the cT1 values were significantly elevated in ‘higher-risk’ subpopulations.
Perspectum Diagnostics’ LiverMultiScan corrects for the amount of iron in the liver. In the population in the reported study 36.5% of subjects had sufficiently high iron concentration in their livers to necessitate correction, emphasizing the importance of this method. Iron correction was also needed in cases of mild iron overload that in itself does not pose a clinical problem.
“Currently patients with suspected liver disease are biopsied which can cause great pain and distress, and there is a big need for a non-invasive biomarker to enable better care of patients. This study establishes a tight normal range for cT1 in a large low-risk population, an important pre-requisite for an imaging biomarker that can an aid early diagnosis and, hopefully, will reduce the number of patients who are unnecessarily biopsied.” – Professor Stefan Neubauer, Chief Medical Ofcer at Perspectum Diagnostics.
“As we move into the era of personalized medicine, it is increasingly becoming important to develop quantitative imaging biomarkers that are uniform across various vendor platforms. This study is an important step in the path for developing a standardized imaging biomarker for liver health and has the potential to replace some of the inherently subjective current methods of assessing liver health.” – Dr Amirkasra Mojtahed from the Division of Abdominal Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston.
Sources:
- https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/large-population-imaging-study-reveals-utility-of-livermultiscan-s-corrected-t1-measure-as-potential-biomarker-for-liver-health-in-metabolic-diseases-896029675.html
- https://perspectum-diagnostics.com/
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00261-018-1701-2
