Keywords:
Abdomen, Liver, Ultrasound, Elastography, Observer performance, Diagnostic procedure, Cirrhosis, Tissue characterisation
Authors:
B. Fejér, A. Kucsa, Z. Unger, T. Youn, M. Abonyi, V. Bérczi, P. Kaposi; Budapest/HU
DOI:
10.1594/ecr2018/C-1265
Methods and materials
We prospectively enrolled 10 healthy volunteers as control group and 32 patients with known liver fibrosis into our study (Table 1).
All pSWE was performed by two different observers on the same occasion. The observers were blinded from each other's measurements and from the patients' prior elastography results.
Results of previous transient elastography (TE) measurements were used as reference to assign METAVIR fibrosis stage to patients.
Thresholds were obtained from published literature [4].
Basic clinical information (weight,
height,
age,
gender,
BMI),
etiology of CLD,
grade of fibrosis,
recent liver function tests and serum enzyme levels were collected.
The Samsung RS80A Prestige ultrasound scanner (Samsung Medison,
Hongcheon,
Korea) with the CA1-7A convex probe was used for all scans. None of the enrolled subjects had ascites on ultrasound imaging.
All LS measurements were performed with the S-Shearwave v 3.0 application following the manufacturer recommended protocol.
The median LS value was reported in units of shear-wave velocity(m/s) (Figure 1).
All statistical calculations were completed with the R x64 v3.4.1 package (www.r-project.org).