Applications for chronic liver diseases : design and implementation of an application for the diagnosis of patients in an advanced stage of cirrosis

Abstract

Currently, cirrhosis is a disease with a high mortality rate becoming among the 14th and 4th main causes of death globally and in Central Europe respectively. In order to decrease this number of mortality, researchers from the Universitätsklinikum Bonn have discovered a new diagnostic method to classify patients in advanced stages of cirrhosis, with the possibility to give priority treatment to the most severe patients. This discovery is mainly based on the importance of the appearance of collateral portosystemic veins, establishing the sum of all cross-sectional areas of these veins, detected from Magnetic Resonance and Computerized Tomography images, as a parameter to assess the severity of the patient. In this moment, the methodology used by radiologists to obtain this parameter is by hand from the computer screen, leading to unreliable results. Our project arises from the need to precise these results, developing a computer application based on image processing that calculates the cross-sectional area of these collateral veins with the aid of the radiologist. Finally, obtaining an intuitive and simple application that gives immediate results and therefore, can bring significant time saving for health professionals.