Development of Non-Invasive MRI Applications for Liver Fibrosis and Inflammation

Development of Fully Automated Non-Invasive MRI Applications for Diagnosis and Staging of Liver Fibrosis and Inflammation

Status

Completed

Phases

Unknown

Study type

Observational

Source

ClinicalTrials.gov

Registry ID

NCT05168982

Enrollment

200

Registered

2021-12-23

Start date

2021-08-01

Completion date

2025-12-31

Last updated

2026-03-19

For informational purposes only — not medical advice. Sourced from public registries and may not reflect the latest updates. Terms

Conditions

Liver Fibrosis

Keywords

MRI, liver fibrosis, liver inflammation

Brief summary

Chronic liver disease is a major healthcare problem in Hong Kong and worldwide. The diagnosis of liver fibrosis and inflammation in patients with chronic liver disease has important prognostic and therapeutic implications. The current gold standard to evaluate and stage the severity of liver fibrosis and inflammation is based on liver biopsies, which are invasive and impractical for screening and monitoring the disease. The existing non-invasive methods still have significant limitations to meet the challenge. Magnetic resonance effect can be used to obtain the molecular-level information on the biochemical properties of human tissues. The investigators will develop non-invasive quantitative MRI technologies to evaluate and stage liver fibrosis and inflammation. Our approaches are based on the endogenous contrast mechanism and thus do not need to inject an MRI contrast agent. Our approaches can be implemented on a regular MRI scanner and do not need any extra hardware. To enable the technology for routine clinical use, the investigators will develop fully automated post-processing techniques for the proposed MRI acquisition approaches. The investigators will perform multi-center clinical studies in Hong Kong and mainland China to validate our imaging measurements by histopathologic results from liver biopsies on patient cohorts.

Interventions

None listed

Study design

Observational model

OTHER

Time perspective

PROSPECTIVE

Eligibility

Sex/Gender

ALL

Age

18 Years to 65 Years

Healthy volunteers

Yes

Inclusion criteria

* Between the age of 18 and 65. * Chronic liver disease (CLD) patients at different stages of liver inflammation (A0-3) and liver fibrosis (F0-4). * CLD patients who have indications and are scheduled to undergo liver biopsy.

Exclusion criteria

* Patients diagnosed with HCC or other types of cancers. * Patients who had undergone liver transplantation before enrollment. * Any contraindications to either liver biopsy or MRI scan.

Design outcomes

Primary

Measure	Time frame	Description
To compare the measurement between subjects with different grades of liver inflammation and stages of liver fibrosis	one year	T-Test or one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) will be performed for continuous variables with normally distribution, along with Kruskal-Wallis test or Mann-Whitney U test for continuous variables with skewed or unknown distribution, while χ2 or Fisher exact test will be carried out for categorical variables.

Countries

Hong Kong

Outcome results