Student: Adela Capilnasiu
1st supervisor: David Nordsletten, King’s College London
2nd supervisor: Ralph Sinkus, King’s College London
Staging and management of fibrosis is a multifactorial and complex process. For instance, the staging of liver fibrosis is complicated when inflammatory components are present. Among the available imaging biomarkers for assessing the degree of fibrosis, shear stiffness measurements have shown great promise. However, inflammation changes liver stiffness equally, rendering the stiffness parameter sensitive to the presence of fibrosis/inflammation, but not specific. Initial clinical data have demonstrated that shear wave speed and attenuation allow to non-invasively estimate metrics for fibrosis and inflammation.
There is an overall trend that increased fibrosis is accompanied by increased inflammation, however the spread is rather large and does not allow one parameter to be deduced from the other. Shear wave penetration is very good and increased fibrosis leads to increased shear wavelengths (indicating increased shear wave speed and hence increased liver stiffness). As expected from previous studies, shear wave speed increases with increasing fibrosis score which allows determining the first histological parameter