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Noninvasive assessment of significant liver fibrosis in rabbits by spectral CT parameters and texture analysis

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Abstract

Purpose

Noninvasive assessment of significant liver fibrosis in rabbits by spectral CT parameters and texture analysis.

Materials and methods

Thirty-three rabbits were randomly divided into 27 carbon tetrachloride-induced liver fibrosis group and 6 control group. Spectral CT contrast-enhanced scan was performed in batches, and the liver fibrosis was staged according to the histopathological results. The portal venous phase spectral CT parameters [70 keV CT value, normalized iodine concentration (NIC), spectral HU curve slope (λHU)] were measured, and MaZda texture analysis was performed on 70 keV monochrome images. Three dimensionality reduction methods and four statistical methods in B11 module were used to perform discriminant analysis and calculate misclassified rate (MCR), and ten texture features under the lowest combination of MCR were statistically analyzed. Receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) was used to calculate the diagnostic performance of spectral parameters and texture features for significant liver fibrosis. Finally, the binary logistic regression was used to further screen independent predictors and establish model.

Results

A total of 23 experimental rabbits and 6 control rabbits were included, of which 16 had significant liver fibrosis. Three spectral CT parameters with significant liver fibrosis were significantly lower than those of non-significant liver fibrosis (p < 0.05), and the AUC ranged from 0.846 to 0.913. The combination analysis of mutual information (MI) and nonlinear discriminant analysis (NDA) had the lowest MCR, which with 0%. In the filtered texture features, four were statistically significant and AUC > 0.5, ranges from 0.764 to 0.875. The logistic regression model showed that Perc.90% and NIC could be used as independent predictors, the overall prediction accuracy of the model was 89.7% and the AUC was 0.976.

Conclusion

Spectral CT parameters and texture features have high diagnostic value for predicting significant liver fibrosis in rabbits, and the combination of the two can improve its diagnostic efficiency.

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Funding

This work was supported by Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai (Research Grant No.19ZR1452400) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Research Grant No. 81673743).

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Author notes

  1. Xiuru Gong and Yaxin Guo have contributed equally.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shanghai Municipal Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, 274 Zhijiang Middle Road, Jing ‘an District, Shanghai, 200071, China

    Xiuru Gong, Yaxin Guo, Tingting Zhu, Dongwei Xing, Qi Shi & Minguang Zhang

Authors
  1. Xiuru Gong
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  2. Yaxin Guo
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  3. Tingting Zhu
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  4. Dongwei Xing
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  5. Qi Shi
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  6. Minguang Zhang
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Contributions

Conception and study design: XRG, YXG and MGZ. Data collection and analysis: XRG, YXG, TTZ and QS. Manuscript writing: XRG, YXG, TTZ, DWX, QS and MGZ. Administrative support: DWX, QS and MGZ. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Qi Shi or Minguang Zhang.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical statement

This study was approved by Shanghai Municipal Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. All study procedures were in accordance with the Statement of Human and Animal Rights.

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Gong, X., Guo, Y., Zhu, T. et al. Noninvasive assessment of significant liver fibrosis in rabbits by spectral CT parameters and texture analysis. Jpn J Radiol 41, 983–993 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11604-023-01423-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11604-023-01423-0

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