Fibrosis assessment is a necessary component of liver disease evaluation not only for prognosis but also for future therapeutic management. Our study objective was to evaluate the accuracy of quantitative assessment of liver fibrosis in patients with chronic viral hepatitis B or C, relying on RTSE results, a method approved and acknowledged in Europe.
Material and methods: Sixty-three consecutive patients diagnosed with chronic viral hepatitis B or C between January 2014 and December 2014 at the Emergency County Hospital of Craiova were enrolled in the study. Patients underwent both TE and RTSE.
Results: The reference method used for staging liver fibrosis was TE, based on its recognition and validation by the European guidelines. Fibrosis was classified as follows: 17.47% of patients were staged as F0, 11.11% of patients staged as F1, 14.28% as F2, 17.47% as F3, and 39.68% as F4. Correlation coefficients between measurements for each parameter was done with ANOVA test, in order to identify any differences, according to the fibrosis stage. Valuable information was obtained suggesting that MEAN, SD, %AREA, COMP, Skewness, IDM and Contrast had highly significant differences when related to the Fibrosis Stage (FS) (p<0,001) and ASM had significant differences (p<0,05). As for Kurtosis, ENT and Correlation parameters no significant differences with the FS was found.
Conclusions: Imaging methods of assessing liver fibrosis are of special interest in chronic liver fibrosis assessment. RTSE comes as a potential new technology based on elastogram evaluation which may prove to be more efficient along with larger prospective studies.
Keywords: Fibrosis stage; RTSE; TE; chronic viral hepatitis.