The conventional method for staging liver diseases involves invasive biopsy. Exploring the potential of a noninvasive option for staging, presenter Dr. Andrew Smith, PhD, and colleagues from the University of Alabama at Birmingham reviewed the CT scans of 193 patients at their institution. The patients were diagnosed with hepatitis C virus infection, which often leads to serious liver fibrosis.
To stage the extent of disease, Smith and colleagues calculated liver surface nodularity scores using computer software to analyze the patients' CT scans. The nodularity scores correlated with the patients' degree of liver fibrosis, they found. This allowed the clinicians to use the scores to stage liver fibrosis by examining the CT scans rather than by performing an invasive liver biopsy.
A comparison of the liver surface nodularity technique and conventional liver biopsy revealed that the noninvasive method was nearly as accurate as biopsy. The accuracy improved even more when the nodularity scoring method was combined with another noninvasive staging method referred to as the fibrosis-4 (FIB-4) index.
The liver surface nodularity score on CT and FIB-4 score are easy to obtain and could help stage liver fibrosis noninvasively and accurately in patients with chronic liver disease, the group noted.
