Non-invasive evaluation of hepatic steatosis by ultrasound image analysis with simple brightness features and support vector machines

State of the art: The gold standard for the quantitative evaluation of steatosis is liver biopsy, but this is an invasive method. The recent trend is to investigate and develop novel non-invasive hepatic tissue evaluation methods, able to give similar performance as the biopsy. Among them, ultrasound image analysis of the liver receives significant interest from the researchers, especially finding the most suitable descriptors of the histological tissue changes. Aim: Non-invasive cuantification of hepatic steatosis by analizing of some numerical parameters extracted after computerized processing of ultrasound im…