Morphometric analysis of tumor microvessels for detection of hepatocellular carcinoma using contrast-free ultrasound imaging: A feasibility study.

A contrast-free ultrasound microvasculature imaging technique was evaluated in this study to determine whether extracting morphological features of the vascular networks in hepatic lesions can be beneficial in differentiating benign and malignant tumors (hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in particular). A total of 29 lesions from 22 patients were included in this work. A post-processing algorithm consisting of clutter filtering, denoising, and vessel enhancement steps was implemented on ultrasound data to visualize microvessel structures. These structures were then further characterized and quantified through additional image processing. A total of nine morphological metrics were examined to compare different groups of lesions. A two-sided Wilcoxon rank sum test was used for statistical analysis. In the malignant versus benign comparison, six of the metrics manifested statistical significance. Comparing only HCC cases with the benign, only three of the metrics were significantly different. No statistically significant distinction was observed between different malignancies (HCC versus cholangiocarcinoma and metastatic adenocarcinoma) for any of the metrics. Obtained results suggest that designing predictive models based on such morphological characteristics on a larger sample size may prove helpful in differentiating benign from malignant liver masses.

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Copyright © 2023 Sabeti, Ternifi, Larson, Olson, Atwell, Fatemi and Alizad.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Authors AA and MF, both hold US Patent 11,213,278 and patent EP 3 634 238 B1. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.