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©2014 Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Dec 28, 2014; 20(48): 18131-18150
Published online Dec 28, 2014. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v20.i48.18131
Published online Dec 28, 2014. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v20.i48.18131
Non invasive tools for the diagnosis of liver cirrhosis
Maurizio Soresi, Lydia Giannitrapani, Anna Licata, Giuseppe Montalto, Unit of Internal Medicine, Biomedical Department of Internal Medicine and Specialties DiBiMIS, University of Palermo, 90127 Palermo, Italy
Melchiorre Cervello, Giuseppe Montalto, Institute of Biomedicine and Molecular Immunology “A. Monroy”, National Research Council (CNR), 90146 Palermo, Italy
Author contributions: Giannitrapani L and Licata A collected and analyzed literature data; Soresi M contributed analytics tools; Montalto G and Cervello M supervised the paper; Soresi M and Giannitrapani L wrote the paper.
Correspondence to: Giuseppe Montalto, Professor, Biomedical Department of Internal Medicine and Specialties DiBiMIS, University of Palermo, via del Vespro 141, 90127 Palermo, Italy. giuseppe.montalto@unipa.it
Telephone: +39-91-6552991 Fax: +39-91-6552977
Received: July 25, 2014
Revised: September 22, 2014
Accepted: November 7, 2014
Published online: December 28, 2014
Revised: September 22, 2014
Accepted: November 7, 2014
Published online: December 28, 2014
Core Tip
Core tip: Liver biopsy is the current best available standard of reference to diagnose liver fibrosis, but it has several limits. Non-invasive methods to detect and follow up liver fibrosis (direct and indirect serum markers, ultrasound, ultrasound doppler, contrast enhanced ultrasound and Elastography) have been extensively studied in the last years but strong evidences of their usefulness in the real practice are still lacking. This work aims to review the most recent literature about the use of these non-invasive markers in defining liver fibrosis.