1. Electrical impedance tomography for non-invasive identification of fatty liver infiltrate in overweight individuals
- Author
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Yu-Chong Tai, Arthur Ko, Susana Cavallero, Holden H. Wu, Yuan Luo, Jonathan P. Jacobs, Zi-Yu Huang, Zhaoping Li, Janet S. Sinsheimer, Alex A. T. Bui, Swarna Das, Shu-Fu Shih, Wei Gao, Jennifer A. Sumner, Päivi Pajukanta, Chih-Chiang Chang, Tzung K. Hsiai, and Qingyu Cui
- Subjects
Male ,Image Processing ,Biopsy ,Oral and gastrointestinal ,Computer-Assisted ,Engineering ,Risk Factors ,Electric Impedance ,Image Processing, Computer-Assisted ,Tomography ,Multidisciplinary ,medicine.diagnostic_test ,Liver Disease ,Fatty liver ,Disease Management ,Middle Aged ,Magnetic Resonance Imaging ,Liver biopsy ,Biomedical Imaging ,Medicine ,Female ,Biomedical engineering ,Algorithms ,Adult ,Waist ,Science ,Chronic Liver Disease and Cirrhosis ,Sensitivity and Specificity ,Article ,Clinical Research ,medicine ,Humans ,Body Weights and Measures ,Electrical impedance tomography ,Aged ,business.industry ,Reproducibility of Results ,Magnetic resonance imaging ,Gold standard (test) ,Overweight ,medicine.disease ,Fatty Liver ,Steatosis ,Digestive Diseases ,Nuclear medicine ,business ,Body mass index ,Biomarkers - Abstract
Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is one of the most common causes of cardiometabolic diseases in overweight individuals. While liver biopsy is the current gold standard to diagnose NAFLD and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a non-invasive alternative still under clinical trials, the former is invasive and the latter costly. We demonstrate electrical impedance tomography (EIT) as a portable method for detecting fatty infiltrate. We enrolled 19 overweight subjects to undergo liver MRI scans, followed by EIT measurements. The MRI images provided the a priori knowledge of the liver boundary conditions for EIT reconstruction, and the multi-echo MRI data quantified liver proton-density fat fraction (PDFF%) to validate fat infiltrate. Using the EIT electrode belts, we circumferentially injected pairwise current to the upper abdomen, followed by acquiring the resulting surface-voltage to reconstruct the liver conductivity. Pearson’s correlation analyses compared EIT conductivity or MRI PDFF with body mass index, age, waist circumference, height, and weight variables. We reveal that the correlation between liver EIT conductivity or MRI PDFF with demographics is statistically insignificant, whereas liver EIT conductivity is inversely correlated with MRI PDFF (R = −0.69, p = 0.003, n = 16). As a pilot study, EIT conductivity provides a portable method for operator-independent and cost-effective detection of hepatic steatosis.
- Published
- 2021