Vasomics of the liver

Abstract

Chronic liver disease is a cluster of disorders associated with complex haemodynamic alterations, which is characterised by structural and functional disruptions of the intrahepatic and extrahepatic vasculature. 'Vasomics' is an emerging omics discipline that comprehensively analyses and models the vascular system by integrating pathophysiology of disease, biomechanics, medical imaging, computational science and artificial intelligence. Vasomics is further typified by its multidimensional, multiscale and high-throughput nature, which depends on the rapid and robust extraction of well-defined vascular phenotypes with clear clinical and/or biological interpretability. By leveraging multimodality medical imaging techniques, vascular functional assessments, pathological image evaluation, and related computational methods, integrated vasomics provides a deeper understanding of the associations between the vascular system and disease. This in turn reveals the crucial role of the vascular system in disease occurrence, progression and treatment responses, thereby supporting precision medicine approaches. Pathological vascular features have already demonstrated their key role in different clinical scenarios. Despite this, vasomics is yet to be widely recognised. Therefore, we furnished a comprehensive definition of vasomics providing a classification of existing hepatic vascular phenotypes into the following categories: anatomical, biomechanical, biochemical, pathophysiological and composite.

Keywords: CIRRHOSIS; LIVER; PORTAL HYPERTENSION.

Figure 1. Vasomics of the liver. Vascular phenotypes are grouped into five categories: anatomical, biomechanical, biochemical, pathophysiological and composite phenotypes. US, ultrasonography.

Figure 2. Bibliometric analysis of existing studies on linguistic landscape from the database of Web of Science between 2000 and 2022. The comprehensive search using keywords ‘liver’ and ‘vessel’ highlights a substantial literature focused on the vascular aspects of liver diseases (A). A notable upward trend in the number of publications is observed over time (B). Among the diverse liver diseases examined, cirrhosis, fibrosis and portal hypertension-related studies are found to be the most extensively covered topics (C).

Figure 3. Key development issues for vasomics. VasToolkit: Vasomics toolkit; VasBank: Vasomics bank (data repository); VasProtocol: Vasomics protocol.