The purposes of this study were comparison of accuracy for the detection of esophageal varices (EV) obtained by liver stiffness (LS) and spleen stiffness (SS) measurement using Virtual Touch Tissue Quantification (VTTQ).
LS and SS were measured in 95 patients with LC and 16 healthy volunteers. The mean SS and LS were significantly higher in the patients with LC than in the volunteers (p<0.001 and p<0.001, respectively).
In pairwise comparison analysis of the areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) for the detection of EV, the accuracy of SS (AUROC=0.963) was better than that of LS (AUROC=0.646) (p<0.001). SS measurement via VTTQ is a useful method for predicting the presence of EV in LC patients.
