Non-invasive diagnosis of liver lesions by blood tests in NAFLD
Résumé
Background and Aims: Non invasive tests are not well developedin NAFLD. This could be partly due to the pathological description of certain lesions that is hampered by semi-quantitative scorings. Our aim was to develop an accurate non-invasive measurement of main liver lesions in NAFLD by blood tests based on a thorough pathological and morphometric analysis. Methods: Steatosis, NASH and fibrosis were graded according to CRN-NASH (Kleiner, Hepatology 2005) and Metavir systems in 226 patients with NAFLD. A fully automated, in-house software measured the fractal dimension (reflecting architecture) and the area (reflecting amount) of steatosis or fibrosis on liver specimens. Independent predictors were selected by logistic or multiple regression repeated in 1000 random bootstrap samples. When models were determined, a second bootstrap resampling was performed to measure optimism bias (Steyerberg et al. 2001).