Liver fibrosis evaluation using real-time shear wave elastography: Applicability and diagnostic performance using methods without a gold standard

Background & Aims Real-time shear wave elastography (SWE) is a new two-dimensional transient elastography which had no assessment of factors associated with reliability, and had limited comparisons with other validated fibrosis biomarkers. The aim was to assess the applicability and performances of SWE for the diagnosis of fibrosis as compared with FibroTest (FT) and liver stiffness measurement (LSM) by transient elastography using two probes (TE-M and TE-XL). Methods Without a gold standard, the strength of concordance, discordance analysis and latent class analysis (LCM) were applied. Results 422 patients were included. The applicability of SWE (90.0%) was significantly lower than that of FT (97.9%; p