Copyright
©The Author(s) 2017. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
Ultrasound shear wave elastography and liver fibrosis: A Prospective Multicenter Study
Joyce Anyona Sande, Sudhir Vinayak, Department of Radiology, Aga Khan University Hospital, Nairobi 30270-00100, Kenya
Suleman Verjee, Department of Statistical, Versante International LLC, Oakland, CA 94606, United States
Farin Amersi, Department of Surgery, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA 90048, United States
Munir Ghesani, Department of Radiology, NYU Langone Medical Center, New York, NY 10016, United States
Author contributions: Sande JA performed the research; Sande JA and Verjee S designed the research and analyzed the data; Sande JA, Verjee S, Vinayak S, Amersi F and Ghesani M contributed equally to this work; Vinayak S contributed new reagents/analytic tools; all the authors wrote the paper.
Institutional review board statement: Aga Khan University Faculty of Health Sciences Research and Ethics Committee reviewed the proposal and related documentation submitted and approved the study based on core scientific and ethical standards which were fully instituted in the protocol.
Informed consent statement: Informed voluntary consent was acquired from all the study participants.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All authors declare no conflicting interests (including but not limited to commercial, personal, political, intellectual or religious interests).
Data sharing statement: Technical appendix, statistical code and data set available from the corresponding author at sande.joyce@gmail.com. Presented data are anonymised and risk of identification is nil.
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/
Correspondence to: Joyce Anyona Sande, MBCHB, Department of Radiology, Aga Khan University Hospital, Stadium Road, Nairobi 30270-00100, Kenya. sande.joyce@gmail.com
Telephone: +254-20-87706015
Received: April 5, 2016
Peer-review started: April 6, 2016
First decision: May 17, 2016
Revised: June 24, 2016
Accepted: August 6, 2016
Article in press: August 8, 2016
Published online: January 8, 2017
Processing time: 275 Days and 15.1 Hours
Peer-review started: April 6, 2016
First decision: May 17, 2016
Revised: June 24, 2016
Accepted: August 6, 2016
Article in press: August 8, 2016
Published online: January 8, 2017
Processing time: 275 Days and 15.1 Hours
Core Tip
Core tip: The gold standard in the diagnosis and staging of liver fibrosis is an invasive liver biopsy. The accuracy of non-invasive tools such as ultrasound shear wave elastography either alone or in combination with the use of the aspartate transaminase platelet ratio index score compared to histology to guide management of liver fibrosis is not known. We addressed this question in a multicenter trial in patients with chronic progressive liver disease in a low to middle income country.