A pilot approach for quantitative assessment of liver fibrosis using ultrasound: preliminary results in 79 cases

Usefulness of textural analysis as a tool for noninvasive liver fibrosis staging

“…Unsupervised quantification of the visual scores could be more effective in staging or tracking the fibrosis evolution because they quantify the ultrasound image alterations that are indirectly produced by fibrosis. Other authors have studied the properties of the reflected RF signal, properties such as attenuation [51], backscatter [52], or statistical properties [9,49,50,53]. The tissue phantom presented here can be applied to optimize these methods.…”

“…There are several approaches found in the literature. Some authors have evaluated the RF signal [1,2], while others have proposed some visual scores [3,4], but most authors have employed a texture analysis system to discriminate between various fibrosis stages [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14].…”

Measuring Fibrosis: Is Seeing Really Believing?

“…Early investigations have focused on the diameter, flow, waveform, and undulation of the three major vessels (the portal vein, hepatic vein and the hepatic artery). Few studies however, focus on distinguishing significant fibrosis (METAVIR stage CF2) from those with less fibrosis (F0-F1), important in determining time to initiate antiviral therapy (Table 1) [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13].…”

“…These indices have potential in detecting different stages of fibrosis, but studies were small and further testing is needed [5,6,10]. One disadvantage of ultrasound imaging is inter-operator variability.…”

Proposal of a parametric imaging method for quantitative diagnosis of liver fibrosis

“…Our group also quantified liver fibrosis by analyzing the echo amplitude envelope [18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. Envelope statistics are often used for tissue characterization using ultrasound [13,15].…”