Liver regeneration in recipients after living-donor liver transplantation in using preoperative CT texture analysis and clinical features; methodological issues on prediction

Excerpt

I was interested to read the article titled “Prediction of liver regeneration in recipients after living-donor liver transplantation in using preoperative CT texture analysis and clinical features” by Park et al. [1]. The purpose of this study was to predict the rate of liver regeneration in recipients after living-donor liver transplantation using preoperative CT texture and shape analysis of the future graft. They included 102 donor–recipient pairs who underwent living-donor liver transplantation using right lobe grafts. They semi-automatically segmented the future graft from preoperative CT. The volume of the future graft (LV_pre) was measured, and texture and shape analyses were performed. The graft liver was segmented from postoperative follow-up CT and the volume of the graft (LV_post) was measured. The regeneration index was defined by the following equation: [(LV_post  LV_pre)/LV_pre] × 100(%). They mentioned that the best-fit predictive model for the regeneration index made by multivariate analysis was as follows: Regeneration index (%) = 127.020  0.367 × effective diameter  1.827 × roundness_m + 47.371 × recipient body surface area (m²) + 12.041 × log (recipient white blood cell count) (× 10³/μL) + 18.034 (if the donor was female). …