Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the fifth most common cancer and is the second leading cause of cancer related death. The most important risk factor is cirrhosis of any etiology, particularly chronic hepatitis b and hepatitis c virus infection. Curative treatment (resection, transplant, or ablation) can be offered to patients diagnosed with early HCC. As the disease remains asymptomatic, most HCCs are diagnosed at an intermediate to terminal stage. Screening is an effective strategy to diagnose early HCC. The current guidelines recommend bi-annual screening with ultrasound (US) with or without alpha- fetoprotein (AFP). The overall sensitivity for detection of HCC using US screening is 60% while it is only 22% for detection of very early and early HCC. This results in many patients having progression of HCC despite being on screening program. Although computed tomography (CT) is widely available, the cumulative radiation dose from multiple screening CT scans makes CT screening unsuitable. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has a high sensitivity and specificity for diagnosis of HCC owing to its high contrast resolution. A recent study showed significantly better sensitivity of HCC detection during screening using contrast enhanced MRI (CE-MRI) as compared with US. The use of CE-MRI entails high cost and risk of nephrogenic systemic fibrosis and is not well suited for screening from the health economics standpoint. Recently abbreviated MRI (AMRI) has been proposed as an acceptable alternative to US for HCC screening. AMRI involves acquisition of only a few MRI sequences rather than the complete MRI. This results in lesser table time and in turn reduced cost. However, most of the data is from retrospective studies. We propose a prospective study to evaluate the role of AMRI for HCC screening.
