Type:
Educational Exhibit
Keywords:
Abdominal Viscera, Liver, CT, Experimental, MR, Computer Applications-Detection, diagnosis, Technical aspects, Cirrhosis, Not applicable
Authors:
R. Cannella, F. Vernuccio, A. Comelli, G. Salvaggio, M. Midiri; Palermo/IT
DOI:
10.26044/ecr2020/C-09540
Background
The diagnosis and staging of hepatic fibrosis is extremely important for the management of patients with chronic liver disease (CLD). The presence of significant and advanced fibrosis has been reported as independent predictor of mortality. Moreover, patients with advanced fibrosis-cirrhosis have a high risk of developing complications such has hepatocellular carcinoma or portal hypertension.
Liver biopsy is the gold standard for the evaluation of hepatic fibrosis. However, biopsy is an invasive procedure with known risks including hemorrhage, infections, pain and may have several limitations such as sampling errors due to limited evaluation of a small portion of liver parenchyma.
Texture analysis is an emerging imaging application that allows the mathematical quantification of heterogeneityby assessing the distribution and/or relationship of pixel gray levels of intensity within a region of interest (ROI). Texture analysis extracts several features from radiological images and allows to obtain additional quantitative information that cannot be captured by human eyes. Recently, texture analysis has been applied to liver imaging for the non-invasive evaluation of hepatic fibrosis (Fig. 1), with several studies reporting a fair-to-good diagnostic performance for the detection of advanced fibrosis or cirrhosis [1-13].
Fig. 1: Texture analysis for evaluation of hepatic fibrosis.
References: Section of Radiology, BIND, University of Palermo, Palermo/IT