Liver volumetry:Is imaging reliable?Personal experience and review of the literature

摘要

The amount of the future liver remnant volume is fun-damental for hepato-biliary surgery, representing animportant potential risk-factor for the development ofpost-hepatectomy liver failure. Despite this, there isno uniform consensus about the amount of hepaticparenchyma that can be safely resected, nor about themodality that should be chosen for this evaluation. Thepre-operative evaluation of hepatic volume, along witha precise identification of vascular and biliar anatomyand variants, are therefore necessary to reduce surgi-cal complications, especially for extensive resections.Some studies have tried to validate imaging methods[ultrasound, computed tomography(CT), magneticresonance imaging] for the assessment of liver volume,but there is no clear evidence about the most accuratemethod for this evaluation. Furthermore, this volumet-ric evaluation seems to have a certain degree of error,tending to overestimate the actual hepatic volume,therefore some conversion factors, which should givea more reliable evaluation of liver volume, have been proposed. It is widespread among non-radiologists the use of independent software for an off-site volumetric analysis, performed on digital imaging and communica-tions in medicine images with their own personal com-puter, but very few studies have provided a validation of these methods. Moreover, while the pre-transplanta-tion volumetric assessment is fundamental, it remains unclear whether it should be routinely performed in all patients undergoing liver resection. In this editorial the role of imaging in the estimation of liver volume is dis-cussed, providing a review of the most recent literature and a brief personal series of correlations between liver volumes and resection specimens' weight, in order to assess the precision of the volumetric CT evaluation.