Evaluation of Innovative Ultrasonic Techniques for Non-invasive Diagnosis of Liver Fibrosis in Patients With Chronic Viral Hepatitis B or C

The non-invasive assessment of liver fibrosis in chronic viral hepatitis B and C is now entering clinical practice. It is based on blood tests, especially FibroMetre® and Fibrotest® and on elastography with the Fibroscan®. Despite the overall satisfactory diagnostic performance for all of these tests (AUROC ranging from 0.80 to 0.90 depending on the study) for the discrimination of F≤1 versus F≥2, the positive and negative predictive values , however, are far from be perfect in a given patient. With these technique, failures are also possible and the measures do not meet quality standards that increase the risk of misclassification. It would be particularly useful to have new generation techniques with a better diagnostic performance. In this project, in response to the problems presented above, we propose to evaluate the diagnostic performance of five innovative ultrasonic techniques for the non-invasive diagnosis of fibrosis.