1  
[PERSON]  
1 Department of Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences, School of Primary and Allied Health Care, Faculty of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne 3800, Australia; [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (H.C.C.F. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (N.S.) 1  
[PERSON]  
1 Department of Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences, School of Primary and Allied Health Care, Faculty of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne 3800, Australia; [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (H.C.F. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (N.S.) 1  
[PERSON]  
1 Department of Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences, School of Primary and Allied Health Care, Faculty of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne 3800, Australia; [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (H.C.F. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (N.S.) 1  
[PERSON]  
1 Department of Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences, School of Primary and Allied Health Care, Faculty of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne 3800, Australia; [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (H.C.C.F. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (N.S.) 1  
[PERSON]  
1 Department of Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences, School of Primary and Allied Health Care, Faculty of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne 3800, Australia; [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (H.C.C.F. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (N.S.) 1  
[PERSON]  
1 Department of Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences, School of Primary and Allied Health Care, Faculty of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne 3800, Australia; [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (H.C.F. );and MASLD remains unclear. Although pancreatic steatosis is an incidental finding in the majority of cases, it is an important clinical finding as it is a risk factor for and suggests a predisposition to pathologies such as pancreatic carcinoma, diabetes, and pancreatitis [2]. Biopsy and histological examination are the most common approaches to assess the amount of pancreatic fat in animal models, but these are invasive and potentially harmful to humans [10]. Chemical-shift-encoded magnetic resonance imaging (CSE-MRI) is an alternative non-invasive method to separate water and fat by using multi-echo gradient-echo acquisition [11; 12]. It allows estimation of the amount of fat by calculating the proton density fat fraction (PDFF), which is the ratio of the amount of fat to the amount of fat plus water [13]. CSE-MRI is considered the most accurate and reliable non-invasive approach to quantify hepatic and pancreatic steatosis, as well as for long-term assessment and monitoring [11; 14]. The signal from CSE-MRI images is not only affected by fat and water proton densities but also by two main confounding factors: the signal decay ratio, \(R_{2}^{*}=1/T_{2}^{*}\), and the off-resonance field. The most common formulation of the CSE-MR signal generation model is shown in (1), considering the resulting signal at the \(n\)-th echo (\(I_{n}\)) [15]. CSE-MRI images depend linearly on \(\rho_{W}\) and \(\rho_{F}\), which are the water and fat proton densities, respectively, and non-linearly on \(R_{2}^{*}\) and \(\phi\), the voxel-wise off-resonance field. This model also considers a multi-peak fat signal spectrum with peaks at \(P\) different frequencies (\(f_{p}\)), each of them with different relative amplitudes (\(\alpha_{p}\)). \[I_{n}(\rho_{W},\rho_{F},R_{2}^{*},\Delta f)=e^{-R_{2}^{*}I_{n}}\cdot e^{|2\pi \phi\cdot I_{n}}\cdot\left[\rho_{W}+\rho_{F}\sum_{p=1}^{P}\alpha_{p}\cdot e_{F} ^{|2\pi f_{p}\cdot I_{n}}\right] \tag{1}\]  
There are different approaches to estimate PDFF based on (1) [16]. An iterative graph-cut-based algorithm is usually considered as the gold standard for water/fat separation [16]. Six echoes are currently used, balancing between the acquisition time and accurate estimation of PDFF [17].