Real-time tissue elastography imaging in the preoperative assessment liver fibrosis and portal vein pressure for hepatectomy        YE Xin-ping* , YANG Hong, Lü Zi-li, et al．*Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery, the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Nanning 530021,China
Corresponding author: YE Xin-ping, E-mail: yexp507@yahoo.com.cn
Abstract    Objective    To explore the feasibility of the real-time tissue elastography (RTE) imaging quantitative method in the evaluation of liver fibrosis and portal vein pressure(PVP). Methods    Thirty-four cases were examined by RTE and measured intraoperative portal vein pressure(PVP) before hepatectomy between June 2010 and August 2010 in the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University. All the examination data were compared with clinical and pathological characteristics. Results    The result of RTE was described as AREA%, which indicates the percentage of hard tissue and represents the hard tissue domain and ranges from 6.8 to 77.9% (median 32.2%). The measurement of intraoperative portal vein pressure was 19 (13-28) cmH2O. According to liver fibrosis stage, all the cases were divided into F0 4 cases, F1 8 cases, F2 9 cases, F3 1 case, F4 12 cases, respectively. PVP was correlated with the liver fibrosis stage significantly (spearman correlation coefficient was 0.548, P<0.001). There were significant differences between each fibrosis stage and AREA%(P<0.001). AREA% was significantly correlated with the PVP (R=0.753, P <0.001).The diagnostic accuracy expressed as areas under receiver operating characteristic (ROC)curves was 0.81 for the diagnosis of severe fibrosis. Conclusion    RTE provides a new convenient non-invasive method to assess liver fibrosis and PVP before operation.