Study Status: RECRUITING
Recruit Status: RECRUITING
Study Type: OBSERVATIONAL
Official Title: Investigation of the Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) Effectiveness in Detecting Fatty Liver Disease
Brief Summary:
Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a condition where hepatocytes contain an abnormally high fat percentage.
This condition is becoming increasingly common due to unhealthy food habits and sedentary lifestyle.
Since NAFLD is a silent disease, many patients would be diagnosed at the advanced stages when fat accumulation, scarring and liver cell damage are irreversible.
Therefore, early diagnosis of fatty liver disease during its reversible stages is warranted.
Current diagnostic techniques for fatty liver disease, such as the FibroScan� and MRI proton density fat fraction (PDFF) are expensive, and require the active work of certified professionals.
Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is an alternative low cost, non-invasive imaging technique that does not involve radiation nor a trained operator.
The electrical conductivity of biological tissues varies according to the tissue type and frequency of AC current.
Fat tissue conductivity is known to be substantially stable across the EIT current injection frequency spectrum.
On the other hand, liver tissue conductivity significantly increases over frequency change.
Hence, the liver fat content can be measured using frequency-difference EIT (fdEIT).
The aim of this study is to investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of fdEIT in detecting fatty liver.
To achieve this goal, a total of 160 subjects will be recruited, paired fdEIT-Fibroscan data will be acquired.
First, optimal fdEIT current injection frequency range will be determined.
Second, fdEIT derived indicators will be computed and statistical analysis will be performed to verify the significance of correlation between the two.
Comparative exploration between EIT and MRI-PDFF will be performed on a subset of the study population, looking at both spatial localization and image derived indicators.
Finally, demographics, clinical assessment and patient history will be analysed to produce demographic group-based insights.