Our initial experiences with endoscopic ultrasound examinations in diffuse liver diseases

Introduction: One of the greatest diagnostic challenges in everyday medical practice is to evaluate the extent of liver fibrosis in diffuse liver diseases. Blind – percutaneous – liver biopsy is considered to be today's „gold standard”, which provides invaluable information for the diagnosis and prognosis of the disease and for the selection of treatment strategy. However, blind liver biopsy obtained from the sample is often not representative of the liver as a whole (it only provides valuable information for 1/50.000 part of the liver). Other disadvantages include the heterogeneous distribution of fibrosis, as…