Use of Computed Tomography Volumetry to Assess Liver Weight in Patients With Cirrhosis During Evaluation Before Living-Donor Liver Transplant

Abstract

Objectives: Computed tomography liver volumetry has been widely used to detect total and segmental liver volume in living-donor liver transplantation. However, use of this technique to evaluate the cirrhotic liver remains unclear. In this study, we evaluated the accuracy of freehand computed tomography volumetry to assess total liver volume by comparing weights of total hepatectomy specimens in patients with cirrhosis. For our analyses, we considered the density of a cirrhotic liver to be 1.1 kg/L.

Materials and Methods: Liver volume was measured using a freehand computed tomography technique in 52 patients with cirrhosis from different causes and who had no solid lesions before transplant. Measurements were made with a 16-slice multidetector computed tomography scanner (Siemens Somatom Sensation 16, Erlangen, Germany). For volumetric measurements, 10-mm-thick slices with 10-mm reconstruction intervals were preferred. Total hepatectomy weights of explant livers and computed tomography volumetry data were compared.

Results: We excluded 3 cirrhotic patients with Budd-Chiari syndrome due to wide variations in scatterplot results. In the 49 patients included in the final analyses, average estimated liver volume by computed tomography was 721 +/- 398 mL and actual cirrhotic liver weight was 727.8 +/- 415 g. No significant differences were shown between these measurements. A simple regression analysis used to analyze correlations between estimated liver volume by computed tomography and real cirrhotic liver weight showed correlation of 0.957 (P < .001). When computed tomography liver volumetry as the independent variable and cirrhotic liver weight as dependent variable were considered, regression analyses showed R-2 = 0.915.

Conclusions: Freehand computed tomography liver volumetry can be confidently used to evaluate liver volume in cirrhotic liver patients similar to use of this technique to estimate actual weights in normal livers. This technique can also be valuable during pretransplant and liver resection evaluations to ensure a more successful outcome.