Observational Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2019. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Jul 7, 2019; 25(25): 3256-3267
Published online Jul 7, 2019. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v25.i25.3256
Assessing significant fibrosis using imaging-based elastography in chronic hepatitis B patients: Pilot study
Hee Sun Park, Won Hyeok Choe, Hye Seung Han, Mi Hye Yu, Young Jun Kim, Sung Il Jung, Jeong Han Kim, So Young Kwon
Hee Sun Park, Mi Hye Yu, Young Jun Kim, Sung Il Jung, Department of Radiology, Konkuk University School of Medicine, Seoul 05030, South Korea
Won Hyeok Choe, Jeong Han Kim, So Young Kwon, Department of Internal Medicine, Konkuk University School of Medicine, Seoul 05030, South Korea
Hye Seung Han, Department of Pathology, Konkuk University School of Medicine, Seoul 05030, South Korea
Author contributions: Choe WH and Park HS contributed to study conception and design; Choe WH, Kim JH and Kwon SY contributed to collection of clinical data; Park HS, Han HS, Yu MH, Kim YJ, Jung SI and Kwon SY contributed to data acquisition, data analysis and interpretation; Park HS, Choe WH, Han HS, Yu MH, Kim YJ, Jung SI, Kim JH and Kwon SY contributed to writing of article, editing, reviewing and final approval of article.
Institutional review board statement: Based on the Declaration of Helsinki, the Institutional Review Board of Konkuk University Hospital approved the retrospective use of the clinical, biochemical, and radiographic data for the present study.
Informed consent statement: The requirements for informed consent were waived due to the retrospective design.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare they have no potential conflicts of interest.
Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
STROBE statement: The authors have read and checked the STROBE checklist.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Won Hyeok Choe, MD, PhD, Professor, Department of Internal Medicine, Konkuk University Medical Center, Konkuk University School of Medicine, 120-1 Neungdong-ro, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul 05030, South Korea. 20050101@kuh.ac.kr
Telephone: +82-2-20305010 Fax: +82-2-20305029
Received: April 19, 2019
Peer-review started: April 19, 2019
First decision: May 9, 2019
Revised: May 20, 2019
Accepted: June 8, 2019
Article in press: June 8, 2019
Published online: July 7, 2019
Processing time: 78 Days and 5.8 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: The present study investigated magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) and two-dimensional shear-wave elastography (2D-SWE) to identify significant fibrosis, and to compare their performance with that of serum-based indices in treatment-naïve chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients with borderline-normal alanine aminotransferase levels, who should be considered for initiation of antiviral therapy depending on the presence of significant fibrosis. Our data demonstrated that MRE was a more accurate and noninvasive measurement for detecting significant fibrosis, compared to 2D-SWE as well as serum-based indices, and our results suggested that MRE could be used as a basis for anti-HBV treatment-decisions in treatment-naïve CHB patients.