Pre-processing in ultrasonography before detection and quantification of early hepatic fibrosis

Tsung-Ter Kuo ； Chii-Jen Chen ； Yi-Hong Chou ； Ming-Hung Kao ； Sun-Hua Pao

《加馬》 52期 (2021/12) Pp. 21-30

摘要

Hepatic fibrosis is a pathological feature for the development from chronic hepatitis to cirrhosis, while liver cirrhosis is likely to develop into liver cancer. Therefore, early detection of hepatic fibrosis can enable early treatment that can prevent worsening of the disease. Medical ultrasound has been easily available for the screening of hepatic fibrosis, but the final result mainly depends on physician's operation. The technique of imaging processing would not replace the role of physician but could help a physician to discriminate them in poor imaging. There were too many imaging techniques used for the texture and morphology analysis in order to quantify the degree of hepatic fibrosis. However, seldom of them paid attention to the image collection and pre-processing before any image analysis. We proposed that standardized scanning, alignment of spatial imaging and adaptive filter should be emphasized rather than analysis techniques applied in imaging texture. The standardization of image collection before any analysis is really the critical issue. Despite no any benefit to very early stage of hepatic fibrosis, our method really did impressive discrimination of the serous fibrosis before cirrhosis (p ＜ 0.00001). Our purpose in this paper was not to praise how excellent was the result. In stead, we have to emphsize how important were the sampling criteria and pre-processing, especially in ultrasonography.

關鍵字

hepatic fibrosis ； cirrhosis ； ultrasound ； liver biopsy ； ultrasonography ； empirical mode decomposition ； entropy