Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Over the past two decades, the epidemiology of chronic liver disease has changed with an increase in the prevalence of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in parallel to the advent of curative treatments for hepatitis C. Recent developments provided new tools for diagnosis and monitoring of liver diseases based on ultrasound (US), computed tomography (CT), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), as applied for assessing steatosis, fibrosis, and focal lesions. This narrative review aims to discuss the emerging approaches for qualitative and quantitative liver imaging, focusing on those expected to become adopted in clinical practice in the next 5 to 10 years. While radiomics is an emerging tool for many of these applications, dedicated techniques have been investigated for US (controlled attenuation parameter, backscatter coefficient, elastography methods such as point shear wave elastography pSWE and transient elastography TE, novel Doppler techniques, and three-dimensional contrast-enhanced ultrasound 3D-CEUS), CT (dual-energy, spectral photon counting, extracellular volume fraction, perfusion, and surface nodularity), and MRI (proton density fat fraction PDFF, elastography MRE, contrast enhancement index, relative enhancement, T1 mapping on the hepatobiliary phase, perfusion). Concurrently, the advent of abbreviated MRI protocols will help fulfill an increasing number of examination requests in an era of healthcare resource constraints.
Vernuccio et al. (Tue,) studied this question.