Monday, December 1 | 8:10 a.m.-8:20 a.m. | M1-SSPD02-4 | Room S502
Attendees to this talk will find out how well 2D shear-wave elastography (SWE) can find liver allograft damage in pediatric liver transplant recipients.
Jeong Min Song, MD, from Asan Medical Center in Seoul, South Korea, will present research findings showing that SWE performed between the ribs (intercostal) has diagnostic value in predicting graft fibrosis in children who received liver transplants.
The study included 108 children with a median age of 13.4 years. The researchers evaluated SWE’s diagnostic value for both intercostal and subcostal (below the ribs) approaches.
The team found significant associations between elasticity measured with the intercostal approach and scores from the Meta-Analysis of Histological Data in Viral Hepatitis (METAVIR) fibrosis grade (coefficient, 1.65; p = 0.001) and liver allograft fibrosis (coefficient, 0.51; p = 0.02). However, subcostal SWE measurements showed no significant associations with any pathological parameters.
Intercostal measurements showed excellent diagnostic performance in detecting severe fibrosis, with an area under the curve (AUC) value of 0.95 (p < 0.001). These also achieved moderate performance for earlier fibrosis stages, including AUCs of 0.7 for F0 to F1 versus F2 to F4 (p = 0.005) and 0.7 for F0 versus F1 to F4 (p = 0.003).
Finally, dispersion slope showed no significant association with any pathological parameters in either intercostal or subcostal approaches.
So, how can these results better inform timely clinical interventions and reduce the need for biopsies? Find out more in this session.



