MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging 2017 | Page 34

Pauline Désogère, Peter Caravan and Bo Zhu are exploring new ways to tackle fibrosis. Photo by Caroline Magnain.
Moving Beyond Biopsy for
Liver Fibrosis
Chronic liver disease is a growing
health concern in the U.S. and
around the world, with links to
alcoholism, diabetes and even
obesity. One of the early manifesta-
tions of the disease is fibrosis, an
excessive buildup of scar tissue that
results from repeated injury to the
liver. While its effects can be halted
or even reversed if caught early
enough, fibrosis can also cause con-
siderable damage, with sometimes
devastating outcomes. Untreated,
liver fibrosis can progress to cir-
rhosis, the twelfth leading cause of
death in the U.S.; to primary liver
cancer; or to liver organ failure.
31
Now, a team of investigators in the
MGH Martinos Center for Biomed-
ical Imaging has reported a novel
means of detecting and staging liver
fibrosis that could yield important
advances in how we manage chronic
liver disease. They described this
new imaging approach in March, in
a paper in the journal Hepatology.
“We combined two imaging
techniques that measure dif-
ferent biophysical properties of
liver fibrosis—tissue stiffness and
collagen content—to stage the
severity of fibrotic progression,”
says Bo Zhu, first author of the
Hepatology paper. “This allows us
to take advantage of the strengths
of both while also overcoming their
respective limitations. The robust-
ness of the combined approach
can prove especially important in
the clinic, where we rarely know
non-invasively the extent to which
the disease has progressed, or even
regressed in the case of anti-fibrotic
treatment.”
At the time of the study, Zhu was a
student working in the Caravan Lab
in the Martinos Center. He is now
a postdoctoral fellow in Matthew
Rosen’s Low-Field Imaging Lab, also