[Challenges of automation in quantitative evaluation of liver biopsies : Automatic quantification of liver steatosis]

Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), or non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), is a common disease that is diagnosed through manual evaluation of liver biopsies, an assessment that is subject to high interobserver variability (IBV). IBV can be reduced using automated methods.

Many existing computer-based methods do not accurately reflect what pathologists evaluate in practice. The goal is to demonstrate how these differences impact the prediction of hepatic steatosis. Additionally, IBV complicates algorithm validation.

Forty tissue sections were analyzed to detect steatosis, nuclei, and fibrosis. Data generated from automated image processing were used to predict steatosis grades. To investigate IBV, 18 liver biopsies were evaluated by multiple observers.

Area-based approaches yielded more strongly correlated results than nucleus-based methods (⌀ Spearman rho [ρ] = 0.92 vs. 0.79). The inclusion of information regarding tissue composition reduced the average absolute error for both area- and nucleus-based predictions by 0.5% and 2.2%, respectively. Our final area-based algorithm, incorporating tissue structure information, achieved a high accuracy (80%) and strong correlation (⌀ Spearman ρ = 0.94) with manual evaluation.

The automatic and deterministic evaluation of steatosis can be improved by integrating information about tissue composition and can serve to reduce the influence of IBV.