Liver Elasticity in NASH Patients Evaluated with Real-Time Elastography (RTE)

Importance of imaging and recent developments in diagnosis of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease

“…It can detect liver cirrhosis with high accuracy but the accuracy is decreased at lower fibrosis stages [53,54] . Studies have reported highly accurate rates in distinguishing severe liver fibrosis from mild liver fibrosis, with 88.9%-100% sensitivities and 75%-100% specificities [54][55][56][57] . In a study of 246 NAFLD patients, using US elastography for the diagnosis of moderate fibrosis, bridging fibrosis and cirrhosis were found to be 0.84, 0.93 and 0.95, respectively [58] .…”

Diagnostic Accuracy of Real-Time Tissue Elastography for the Staging of Liver Fibrosis: A Meta-Analysis

“…After a detailed review of these articles, 15 articles were selected for the final analysis ( Fig. 1) [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]. The quality of the eligible studies, as assessed according to the QUADAS-2 criteria, is reported in Table 1.…”

“…For scoring methods in RTE systems, there was no evidence that the scoring methods had any effect on sensitivity or FPR when the methods were broadly classified into four methods: elastic index [25,30], elastic ratio with reference to muscle [23,36], elastic ratio with reference to vein [24,35,39], liver fibrosis index (LFI) [26][27][28]38], and others [29,34,37,40] (Supplementary Table 2). Further, controlling for types of diseases included in the studies (whether the study included subjects of healthy volunteers; and which disease types subjects had, NAFLD/NASH, or other liver diseases such as viral hepatitis) did not significantly affect sensitivity or FPR (Supplementary Table 3).…”

“…A meta-analysis that directly compares the accuracy between TE and ARFI has reported that ARFI performs with as good a diagnostic accuracy as TE for the estimation of liver fibrosis [33]. Although an increasing number of studies have evaluated RTE for the estimation of liver fibrosis in diverse liver diseases [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][34][35][36][37][38][39][40], a meta-analysis has not been conducted on the topic. In the present study, therefore, we performed a meta-analysis to assess the overall performance of RTE for the diagnosis of liver fibrosis.…”

Elastography: Principles and considerations for clinical research in veterinary medicine cibele

“…The literature reports that mechanical elastography has been used as an auxiliary method in conventional ultrasound imaging for differentiating malignant from benign focal lesions (O'Brian and Holmes, 2007). Preliminary studies of its use in liver tissue have aimed to standardize the technique and evaluate its diagnostic value in detecting focal and diffuse lesions, differentiating malignant and benign processes (Carvalho et al, 2012), and detecting degenerative and inflammatory processes (Orlacchio et al, 2012) in addition to quantifying fibrosis in human (Boozari et al, 2010) and canine (Rivero-Juárez et al, 2012) patients. For these reasons, many expectations have been generated regarding this new technique (Jaffer et al, 2012).…”