AI advances in the liver disease field

MASH represents the advanced inflammatory form of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD, formerly known as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease), where fat accumulation in the liver triggers fibrosis and progressive liver injury.

As a major public health challenge, MASH affects an estimated 13 million American adults, according to the American Liver Foundation. 

According to a recent MedCentral article, more AI-based clinical assessment tools in MASH are needed.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently validated the first AI-enabled drug development tool: the AI-Based Histologic Measurement of NASH (AIM-NASH). Designed for clinical trial use, the cloud-based system leverages historical nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH; currently known as metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis or MASH) datasets and scoring systems to enable standardized clinical scoring of liver biopsy features.

Adam Myer, MD, assistant professor of clinical medicine at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and gastroenterologist and transplant hepatologist, highlighted that AI is already being used in diagnosis and risk assessment of other hepatic conditions.

“Clinicians rely on scoring systems such as APRI (AST-to-Platelet Ratio Index) and FIB-4 (Fibrosis‑4 Index), which use routine lab tests and age to estimate the likelihood of advanced scarring, and many health systems now automate these scores in electronic medical records (EMR) to flag high-risk patients earlier,” he said. “AI is also being applied to imaging, helping detect incidental fatty liver on scans performed for other reasons.”

Read the complete MedCentral article.

Featured image at top: iStock/Viorika.