Computational Imaging Research Lab, Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image - guided Therapy, Medical University of Vienna, Austria . Abstract (2 50 words) Background We aimed to quantify hepatic vessel volumes across chronic liver disease stages and healthy controls using deep learning - based magnetic resonance imaging ( MRI) analysis, and assess correlations with biomarkers for liver (dys)function and fibrosis/portal hypertension. Methods We assessed retrospectively healthy controls, non - advanced and advanced chronic liver disease (ACLD) patients using a 3D U - Net model for hepatic vessel segmentation on portal venous phase gadoxetic acid - enhanced 3 - T MRI. Total (TVVR), hepatic (HVVR), and intrahepatic portal vein - to - volume ratios (PVVR) were compared between groups and c orrelat ed with: a lbumin - b ilirubin [ ALBI ] and "m odel for e nd - s tage l iver d isease - s odium " [ MELD - Na ] s core) and fibrosis/portal hypertension (Fibrosis - 4 [ FIB - 4 ] Score, liver stiffness measurement [ LSM ], hepatic venous pressure gradient [ HVPG ], platelet count [ PLT ], and spleen volume. Results We included 197 subjects, aged 54.9 13.8 years (mean standard deviation), 111 males ( 56 .3 TVVR and HVVR were highest in controls (3.9; 2.1), intermediate in non - ACLD (2.8; 1.7), and lowest in ACLD patients (2.3; 1.0) ( p 0. 001) . PVVR was reduced in both non - ACLD and ACLD patients (both 1.2) compared to controls (1.7) ( p 0. 001), but showed no difference between CLD groups ( p = 0.999) . TVVR and PVVR showed similar but weaker correlations. Conclusion s Deep learning - based hepatic vessel volumetry demonstrate d differences between healthy liver and chronic liver disease stages and shows correlations with established markers of disease severity. Relevance s tatement Hepatic vessel volumetry demonstrates differences between healthy liver and chronic liver disease stages, potentially serving as a non - invasive imaging biomarker.

Background: Cirrhosis is a progressive liver disease with high mortality and frequent complications, notably acute kidney injury (AKI), which occurs in up to 50% of hospitalized patients and worsens outcomes. AKI stems from complex hemodynamic, inflammatory, and metabolic changes, making early detection essential. Many predictive tools lack accuracy, interpretability, and alignment with intensive care unit (ICU) workflows. This study developed an interpretable machine learning model for early AKI prediction in critically ill patients with cirrhosis. Methods: We conducted a retrospective analysis of the MIMIC-IV v2.2 database, identifying 1240 adult ICU patients with cirrhosis and excluding those with ICU stays under 48 hours or missing key data. Laboratory and physiological variables from the first 48 hours were extracted. The pipeline included preprocessing, missingness filtering, LASSO feature selection, and SMOTE class balancing. Six algorithms-LightGBM, CatBoost, XGBoost, logistic regression, naive Bayes, and neural networks-were trained and evaluated using AUROC, accuracy, F1-score, sensitivity, specificity, and predictive values. Results: LightGBM achieved the best performance (AUROC 0.808, 95% CI 0.741-0.856; accuracy 0.704; NPV 0.911). Key predictors included prolonged partial thromboplastin time, absence of outside-facility 20G placement, low pH, and altered pO2, consistent with known cirrhosis-AKI mechanisms and suggesting actionable targets. Conclusion: The LightGBM-based model enables accurate early AKI risk stratification in ICU patients with cirrhosis using routine clinical variables. Its high negative predictive value supports safe de-escalation for low-risk patients, and interpretability fosters clinician trust and targeted prevention. External validation and integration into electronic health record systems are warranted.

Liver cirrhosis is an insidious condition involving the substitution of normal liver tissue with fibrous scar tissue and causing major health complications. The conventional method of diagnosis using liver biopsy is invasive and, therefore, inconvenient for use in regular screening. In this paper,we present a hybrid model that combines machine learning techniques with clinical data and ultrasoundscans to improve liver fibrosis and cirrhosis detection accuracy is presented. The model integrates fixed blood test probabilities with deep learning model predictions (DenseNet-201) for ultrasonic images. The combined hybrid model achieved an accuracy of 92.5%. The findings establish the viability of the combined model in enhancing diagnosis accuracy and supporting early intervention in liver disease care.

We present an end-to-end deep learning framework for automated liver cirrhosis stage estimation from multi-sequence MRI. Cirrhosis is the severe scarring (fibrosis) of the liver and a common endpoint of various chronic liver diseases. Early diagnosis is vital to prevent complications such as decompensation and cancer, which significantly decreases life expectancy. However, diagnosing cirrhosis in its early stages is challenging, and patients often present with life-threatening complications. Our approach integrates multi-scale feature learning with sequence-specific attention mechanisms to capture subtle tissue variations across cirrhosis progression stages. Using CirrMRI600+, a large-scale publicly available dataset of 628 high-resolution MRI scans from 339 patients, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in three-stage cirrhosis classification. Our best model achieves 72.8% accuracy on T1W and 63.8% on T2W sequences, significantly outperforming traditional radiomics-based approaches. Through extensive ablation studies, we show that our architecture effectively learns stage-specific imaging biomarkers. We establish new benchmarks for automated cirrhosis staging and provide insights for developing clinically applicable deep learning systems. The source code will be available at https://github.com/JunZengz/CirrhosisStage.

Background: Liver diseases are a major global health concern, often diagnosed using resource-intensive methods. Electrocardiogram (ECG) data, widely accessible and non-invasive, offers potential as a diagnostic tool for liver diseases, leveraging the physiological connections between cardiovascular and hepatic health. Methods: This study applies machine learning models to ECG data for the diagnosis of liver diseases. The pipeline, combining tree-based models with Shapley values for explainability, was trained, internally validated, and externally validated on an independent cohort, demonstrating robust generalizability. Findings: Our results demonstrate the potential of ECG to derive biomarkers to diagnose liver diseases. Shapley values revealed key ECG features contributing to model predictions, highlighting already known connections between cardiovascular biomarkers and hepatic conditions as well as providing new ones. Furthermore, our approach holds promise as a scalable and affordable solution for liver disease detection, particularly in resource-limited settings. Interpretation: This study underscores the feasibility of leveraging ECG features and machine learning to enhance the diagnosis of liver diseases. By providing interpretable insights into cardiovascular-liver interactions, the approach bridges existing gaps in non-invasive diagnostics, offering implications for broader systemic disease monitoring.

Patients with low health literacy usually have difficulty understanding medical jargon and the complex structure of professional medical language. Although some studies are proposed to automatically translate expert language into layperson-understandable language, only a few of them focus on both accuracy and readability aspects simultaneously in the clinical domain. Thus, simplification of the clinical language is still a challenging task, but unfortunately, it is not yet fully addressed in previous work. To benchmark this task, we construct a new dataset named MedLane to support the development and evaluation of automated clinical language simplification approaches. Besides, we propose a new model called DECLARE that follows the human annotation procedure and achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with eight strong baselines. To fairly evaluate the performance, we also propose three specific evaluation metrics. Experimental results demonstrate the utility of the annotated MedLane dataset and the effectiveness of the proposed model DECLARE.

Large medical imaging datasets can be cheaply and quickly annotated with low-confidence, weak labels (e.g., radiological scores). Access to high-confidence labels, such as histology-based diagnoses, is rare and costly. Pretraining strategies, like contrastive learning (CL) methods, can leverage unlabeled or weakly-annotated datasets. These methods typically require large batch sizes, which poses a difficulty in the case of large 3D images at full resolution, due to limited GPU memory. Nevertheless, volumetric positional information about the spatial context of each 2D slice can be very important for some medical applications. In this work, we propose an efficient weakly-supervised positional (WSP) contrastive learning strategy where we integrate both the spatial context of each 2D slice and a weak label via a generic kernel-based loss function. We illustrate our method on cirrhosis prediction using a large volume of weakly-labeled images, namely radiological low-confidence annotations, and small strongly-labeled (i.e., high-confidence) datasets. The proposed model improves the classification AUC by 5% with respect to a baseline model on our internal dataset, and by 26% on the public LIHC dataset from the Cancer Genome Atlas.

Root causes of disease intuitively correspond to root vertices that increase the likelihood of a diagnosis. This description of a root cause nevertheless lacks the rigorous mathematical formulation needed for the development of computer algorithms designed to automatically detect root causes from data. Prior work defined patient-specific root causes of disease using an interventionalist account that only climbs to the second rung of Pearl's Ladder of Causation. In this theoretical piece, we climb to the third rung by proposing a counterfactual definition matching clinical intuition based on fixed factual data alone. We then show how to assign a root causal contribution score to each variable using Shapley values from explainable artificial intelligence. The proposed counterfactual formulation of patient-specific root causes of disease accounts for noisy labels, adapts to disease prevalence and admits fast computation without the need for counterfactual simulation.

Identifying cirrhosis is key to correctly assess the health of the liver. However, the gold standard diagnosis of the cirrhosis needs a medical intervention to obtain the histological confirmation, e.g. the METAVIR score, as the radiological presentation can be equivocal. In this work, we propose to leverage transfer learning from large datasets annotated by radiologists, which we consider as a weak annotation, to predict the histological score available on a small annex dataset. To this end, we propose to compare different pretraining methods, namely weakly-supervised and self-supervised ones, to improve the prediction of the cirrhosis. Finally, we introduce a loss function combining both supervised and self-supervised frameworks for pretraining. This method outperforms the baseline classification of the METAVIR score, reaching an AUC of 0.84 and a balanced accuracy of 0.75, compared to 0.77 and 0.72 for a baseline classifier.

Introduction: Readmission and death in cirrhosis are common, expensive, and difficult to predict. Our aim was to evaluate the abilities of multiple artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to predict clinical outcomes based on variables collected at admission, during hospitalization, and at discharge. Methods: We used the multicenter North American Consortium for the Study of End-Stage Liver Disease (NACSELD) cohort of cirrhotic inpatients who are followed up through 90-days postdischarge for readmission and death. We used statistical methods to select variables that are significant for readmission and death and trained 3 AI models, including logistic regression (LR), kernel support vector machine (SVM), and random forest classifiers (RFC), to predict readmission and death. We used the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) from 10-fold crossvalidation for evaluation to compare sexes.