Advances in Assessing Preoperative Liver Function with Gd-EOB-DTPA Dynamic Contrast Enhanced MRI

Liver cancer is the common malignant tumor in China and current treatment is based on surgery. However, liver function of many liver cancer patients is impaired before surgery, so there’s a high possibility of occurrence of liver failure after the tumor resection. Therefore, it’s necessary to accurately evaluate liver function before surgery. Currently, clinical methods are mostly limited to assess the function of overall liver. But the application of hepatocyte-specific contrast agent—gadolinium ethoxybenzyl diethylenetriamine pentaacetic acid (Gd-EOB-DTPA) makes it possible to assess the function of local liver segment accurately. This paper reviewed the progress of using Gd-EOB-DTPA dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to assess liver function preoperatively, such as parameters selection for liver function assessment, clinical factors affecting Gd-EOB-DTPA enhanced MRI and so on.