2023 Volume 41 Issue 3 Pages 106-111
With the worldwide increase in patients with chronic liver disease, shear wave elastography, which measures liver stiffness noninvasively using ultrasound, is widely performed in clinical practice. On the other hand, different diagnostic criteria have been reported for each device due to bias in measurements between devices. The inter-operator measurement variations and differences in stiffness compared with MR elastography have also been experienced, leading to confusion in its clinical use for diagnosis. Japan-QIBA, an imaging biomarker standardization committee, reported that the 95% confidence interval of the inter-device bias measuring viscoelastic phantoms was 11% for using the convex probe, and that the difference in frequency bands used in the measurements and analysis caused a discrepancy in stiffness between the US and MR elastography. Standardization of attenuation imaging for the diagnosis of fatty liver is also being considered in QIBA. It is expected that standardization of ultrasound biomarkers will improve the accuracy of ultrasound diagnosis of chronic liver disease in the future.
