Novel Techniques for Assessing Liver Function (HEALED): Imaging Biomarkers for Disease Detection and Tissue Characterization

Liver disease is very common, but early symptoms and clinical findings such as inflammation, are usually very subtle. Even after laboratory and radiological investigation, a number of differential diagnoses may be considered.

In many cases, invasive biopsy of the liver will be necessary to reach a decision on diagnosis and treatment.We propose an alternative, where diagnostics of liver disease is performed non-invasively using multimodal Magnetic Resonance in combination with modeling techniques.

By developing an array of different new techniques, many complementary aspects of liver disease will be obtained in a single patient.

The unique techniques provides grading of inflammation, fibrosis, lipid storage, iron deposition and measurement of total as well as regional hepatic and biliary function, hepatic blood flow (including early signs of portal hypertension), morphological imaging of biliary structure and detection of focal lesions in a single patient.The new techniques will be evaluated prospectively in a large patient group, and compared with conventional clinical methods including histological and quantitative digital analysis of liver biopsies.

In the future, our developments may form the foundation for clinical routine investigations of human liver, such as staging of inflammation, which will obviate the need for invasive liver biopsies.

Furthermore we believe that the techniques will become indispensable for decision-making for individualized therapy of disease.