Lixia Wang ¹ Lu Liang ² Jiyang Zhang ² Chaowei Wu ^1,3 Yang Zhou ² Yang Yu ² Chen Zhang ⁴ Christie Y. Jeon ⁵ Tao Jiang ² Srinivas Gaddam ⁶ Yibin Xie ¹ Stephen J. Pandol ⁷ Qi Yang ² Debiao Li ^1,3*

• ¹ Biomedical Imaging Research Institute, Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, United States
• ² Department of Radiology, Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China
• ³ Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, United States
• ⁴ Siemens Healthcare (China), Beijing, China
• ⁵ Department of Medicine, Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, United States
• ⁶ Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute, Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, United States
• ⁷ Division of Digestive and Liver Diseases, Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, United States

The pancreas plays an important role in nutrition and metabolism of whole body. Many disease processes including obesity, diabetes mellitus (DM), acute or chronic pancreatitis, and pancreatic carcinoma result in abnormality of pancreas morphology and function. MRI provides quantitative parameters including T1, T2 and ADC values for evaluating normal and abnormal pancreas. Based on the normal range of these quantitative parameters, the pancreatic abnormality could be detected early. However, the range and relationship of T1, T2 and ADC values with gender and age groups using the same dataset have not been explored.To establish the ranges of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tissue and functional parameters, including T1, T2, and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) values, in the healthy adult pancreas and their correlations with gender, subregion, and age.The T1, T2, and ADC values of healthy pancreas in 86 adults were measured using a 3.0T MRI scanner. Average T1, T2, and ADC values were obtained in the whole pancreas and subregions (head, neck, body, and tail). Their correlations with gender and age were investigated.The T1, T2, and ADC values of the whole pancreas from all subjects were 870.07±61.86 ms, 44.07±6.14 ms, and 1.072±0.212´10 -3 mm 2 /s, respectively. T2 values were significantly different between genders (P<0.05). No significant differences were found between subregions. The T1, T2, and ADC values differed significantly among age groups (P<0.05). T1 value revealed a moderately positive correlation while T2 and ADC values displayed negative correlations with age (r = 0.31, -0.45 and -0.39, respectively). Combination of T1, T2 and ADC values, achieved highest AUC value and showed significantly difference compared with T1, T2 and ADC alone in predicting age older than 45 years.This study established the normal ranges of T1, T2, and ADC. We found that T2 is different between men and women, and T1, T2, and ADC is age dependent. These results could be useful for quantitative MRI of the pancreatic disease.