Study of Liver Surface Imaging Marker to Monitor Chronic Liver Disease Progression

Abstract

Chronic liver disease is affecting increasing number of people worldwide. However, the progression mechanism is not fully understood because of the complex histological spectrum involved and the lack of proper imaging markers to systematically monitor the disease progression. This thesis describes the progress made in studying the imaging markers using various optical microscopic techniques. The hypothesis behind is that hepatic microcirculation is a meaningful marker for chronic liver disease. Bearing the hypothesis, imaging markers are studied correlating to two different histological spectra, i.e. fibrosis and steatosis. We discovered that the onset of the microcirculation feature change was between the early to middle stage of fibrosis; the redox status of hepatocytes was related to the hepatic fibrosis; we also demonstrated the dominant role of fatty acid accumulation in steatosis. The results of this study are important to understand disease progression mechanism and possibly monitor chronic liver disease in the future.