Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 22, 2025
Author Spotlight: A Non-Invasive Tool to Assess and Differentiate Fat Patterns in Liver Using 3D Dixon MRI
Published on: October 20, 2023
Noninvasive, quantitative evaluation of hepatic steatosis of donor livers by reference frequency method: A
Jieyang Jin1, Ping Gong2, Qing Yang3
1Department of Ultrasound, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-Sen University, 600 Tianhe Road, Guangzhou, China; GuangDong Key Laboratory of Liver Disease Research, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-Sen University, 600 Tianhe Road, Guangzhou, China.
Purpose:
Evaluating degree of hepatic steatosis is of great value for prognosis of liver transplantation. There is an urgent need for a non-invasive method to assess hepatic steatosis grade of donor livers. Purpose of our study was to evaluate diagnostic accuracy of attenuation coefficient estimation (ACE) by reference frequency method (RFM) in detecting hepatic steatosis of donor livers.
Method:
We retrospectively enrolled 62 potential liver donors which underwent ACE by RFM ex-vivo, in-vivo or both. We acquired raw data of B-mode images of liver parenchyma and offline-processes for attenuation estimation. Finally, we calculated and compared diagnostic performance of ACEs for steatosis grade detection and used histological results as the gold standard.
Results:
ACEs with none, mild and moderate hepatic steatosis were 0.57, 0.73 and 0.80 dB/cm/MHz in potential donor livers. The cutoff value to diagnose mild hepatic steatosis was 0.63 dB/cm/MHz and 0.77 dB/cm/MHz for moderate hepatic steatosis, and values for the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for diagnosis of mild and moderate hepatic steatosis were 0.92 and 0.90, respectively.
Conclusions:
According to our results, ACE by RFM is an accurate non-invasive method in detecting hepatic steatosis, which may be of great help for clinical evaluation of donor livers before liver transplantation.
