Novel Controlled Attenuation Parameter for the evaluation of fatty liver disease

There is a need for novel non-invasive methods to detect and quantify steatosis which is an intracellular accumulation of fat in the liver that can be associated in many cases with hepatitis. A novel attenuation parameter named Controlled Attenuation Parameter (CAP) has been developed to process the raw ultrasonic signals acquired by the Fibroscan^® which is an ultrasound-based VCTE¿ device used to diagnose liver disease. Performance of the CAP parameter to detect and quantify steatosis is assessed in a large multi-etiology cohort of 495 patients, taking the histologic staging of steatosis as a reference. CAP is found to be significantly correlated to steatosis and its values are significantly different in each steatosis stages. Diagnosis performances were assessed using the ROC curves. Areas under ROC curves were found to be equal to 0.85 and 0.90 for the diagnosis of more than 10% and 33% of fatty deposit, respectively. Results obtained in this first preliminary study are very promising. Combination of both CAP and liver stiffness measurement may improve liver diseases diagnosis performance.