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. 2017 Jul:2017:2920-2923.
doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2017.8037468.

Non-invasive diagnosis of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) using ultrasound image echogenicity

Alex Benjamin, Rebecca Zubajlo, Kai Thomenius, Manish Dhyani, Kanakaraju Kaliannan, Anthony E Samir, Brian W Anthony

Non-invasive diagnosis of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) using ultrasound image echogenicity

Alex Benjamin et al. Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2017 Jul.

Abstract

This paper introduces a non-invasive, quantitative technique to diagnose the progression of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). The method is predicated on two fundamental principles: 1) the speed of sound in a fatty liver is lower than that in a healthy liver and 2) the quality of an ultrasound image is maximized when the beamformer's speed of sound matches the true speed of sound in the tissue being examined. The proposed method uses the echogenicity of an ultrasound image as a quantitative measure to estimate the true speed of sound within the liver parenchyma and capture its correlation with the underlying fat content. The proposed technique was evaluated in simulations and then tested ex vivo on sheep liver, mice liver (healthy and fatty) and tissue-mimicking phantoms. In the case of the phantom and sheep liver, the method was able to estimate the true speed of sound with errors of less than 0.5%; in the case of the mice livers, the method was able to accurately estimate the speed of sound within the livers (less than 1% error) and capture the correlation between fat content and speed of sound. Thereby, demonstrating the capability of ultrasound technology to non-invasively, quantitatively, and accurately diagnose NAFLD at point of care.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Measured distance calibration on the GE Logiq E9 (9 MHz probe) for determination of ex vivo ground-truth speed of sound values.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Predicted speed of sound in the CIRS liver phantom; the prediction coincides with the calibrated value of 1540 m/s, resulting in an error of less than 0.5%.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Predicted speed of sound in the simulation medium using the echogenicity metric; the prediction coincides with the true of 1540 m/s, resulting in an error of less than 0.5%.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Pathology results of the sheep liver show a lack of large fat vacuoles within the parenchyma, thereby corroborating its leanness; hematoxylin and eosin stain (left) and oil-red-o stain (right) for staining lipids and triglycerides.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Predicted speed of sound (1540 m/s) within the liver parenchyma using the normalized metric; ground truth measurements indicated that the speed of sound within the liver is roughly 1540 m/s, resulting in an error of less than 1%.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Pathology results of the control specimen, indicating a lack of fat vacuoles (left) and fatty specimen with a large number of fat vacuoles (right).
Figure 6
Figure 6
Predicted speed of sound in the control specimen (1500 m/s) and the fatty specimen (1460 m/s); the predictions are consistent with the pathology results from above.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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