TY - JOUR
T1 - Deep-learning-based hepatic fat assessment (DeHFt) on non-contrast chest CT and its association with disease severity in COVID-19 infections
T2 - A multi-site retrospective study
AU - Modanwal, Gourav
AU - Al-Kindi, Sadeer
AU - Walker, Jonathan
AU - Dhamdhere, Rohan
AU - Yuan, Lei
AU - Ji, Mengyao
AU - Lu, Cheng
AU - Fu, Pingfu
AU - Rajagopalan, Sanjay
AU - Madabhushi, Anant
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors
PY - 2022/11
Y1 - 2022/11
N2 - Background: Hepatic steatosis (HS) identified on CT may provide an integrated cardiometabolic and COVID-19 risk assessment. This study presents a deep-learning-based hepatic fat assessment (DeHFt) pipeline for (a) more standardised measurements and (b) investigating the association between HS (liver-to-spleen attenuation ratio <1 in CT) and COVID-19 infections severity, wherein severity is defined as requiring invasive mechanical ventilation, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, death. Methods: DeHFt comprises two steps. First, a deep-learning-based segmentation model (3D residual-UNet) is trained (N = 80) to segment the liver and spleen. Second, CT attenuation is estimated using slice-based and volumetric-based methods. DeHFt-based mean liver and liver-to-spleen attenuation are compared with an expert's ROI-based measurements. We further obtained the liver-to-spleen attenuation ratio in a large multi-site cohort of patients with COVID-19 infections (D1, N = 805; D2, N = 1917; D3, N = 169) using the DeHFt pipeline and investigated the association between HS and COVID-19 infections severity. Findings: The DeHFt pipeline achieved a dice coefficient of 0.95, 95% CI [0.93–0.96] on the independent validation cohort (N = 49). The automated slice-based and volumetric-based liver and liver-to-spleen attenuation estimations strongly correlated with expert's measurement. In the COVID-19 cohorts, severe infections had a higher proportion of patients with HS than non-severe infections (pooled OR = 1.50, 95% CI [1.20–1.88], P <.001). Interpretation: The DeHFt pipeline enabled accurate segmentation of liver and spleen on non-contrast CTs and automated estimation of liver and liver-to-spleen attenuation ratio. In three cohorts of patients with COVID-19 infections (N = 2891), HS was associated with disease severity. Pending validation, DeHFt provides an automated CT-based metabolic risk assessment. Funding: For a full list of funding bodies, please see the Acknowledgements.
AB - Background: Hepatic steatosis (HS) identified on CT may provide an integrated cardiometabolic and COVID-19 risk assessment. This study presents a deep-learning-based hepatic fat assessment (DeHFt) pipeline for (a) more standardised measurements and (b) investigating the association between HS (liver-to-spleen attenuation ratio <1 in CT) and COVID-19 infections severity, wherein severity is defined as requiring invasive mechanical ventilation, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, death. Methods: DeHFt comprises two steps. First, a deep-learning-based segmentation model (3D residual-UNet) is trained (N = 80) to segment the liver and spleen. Second, CT attenuation is estimated using slice-based and volumetric-based methods. DeHFt-based mean liver and liver-to-spleen attenuation are compared with an expert's ROI-based measurements. We further obtained the liver-to-spleen attenuation ratio in a large multi-site cohort of patients with COVID-19 infections (D1, N = 805; D2, N = 1917; D3, N = 169) using the DeHFt pipeline and investigated the association between HS and COVID-19 infections severity. Findings: The DeHFt pipeline achieved a dice coefficient of 0.95, 95% CI [0.93–0.96] on the independent validation cohort (N = 49). The automated slice-based and volumetric-based liver and liver-to-spleen attenuation estimations strongly correlated with expert's measurement. In the COVID-19 cohorts, severe infections had a higher proportion of patients with HS than non-severe infections (pooled OR = 1.50, 95% CI [1.20–1.88], P <.001). Interpretation: The DeHFt pipeline enabled accurate segmentation of liver and spleen on non-contrast CTs and automated estimation of liver and liver-to-spleen attenuation ratio. In three cohorts of patients with COVID-19 infections (N = 2891), HS was associated with disease severity. Pending validation, DeHFt provides an automated CT-based metabolic risk assessment. Funding: For a full list of funding bodies, please see the Acknowledgements.
KW - COVID-19
KW - Hepatic steatosis
KW - NAFLD
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U2 - 10.1016/j.ebiom.2022.104315
DO - 10.1016/j.ebiom.2022.104315
M3 - Article
C2 - 36309007
AN - SCOPUS:85140448108
SN - 2352-3964
VL - 85
JO - EBioMedicine
JF - EBioMedicine
M1 - 104315
ER -