Noncontrast-enhanced mri-based noninvasive score for portal hypertension (Chess1802): An international multicenter study

Background and Aims: This study aimed to determine the performance of the non-invasive score using noncontrast-enhanced MRI (CHESS-DIS score) for detecting portal hypertension in cirrhosis. Methods: In this international mul-ticenter, diagnostic study (ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT03766880), patients with cirrhosis who had hepatic venous pressure gradient (HVPG) measurement and noncontrast-enhanced MRI were prospectively recruited from four university hospitals in China (n=4) and Turkey (n=1) between December 2018 and April 2019. A cohort of patients was retrospectively recruited from a university hospital in Italy between March 2015 and November 2017. After segmentation of the liver on fat-sup-pressed T1-weighted MRI maps, CHESS-DIS score was cal-culated automatically by an in-house developed code based on the quantification of liver surface nodularity. Results: A total of 149 patients were included, of which 124 were from four Chinese hospitals (training cohort) and 25 were from two international hospitals (validation cohort). A posi-tive correlation between CHESS-DIS score and HVPG was found with the correlation coefficients of 0.36 (p<0.0001) and 0.55 (p<0.01) for the training and validation cohorts, respectively. The area under the receiver operating charac-teristic curve of CHESS-DIS score in detection of clinically significant portal hypertension (CSPH) was 0.81 and 0.9 in the training and validation cohorts, respectively. The intra-class correlation coefficients for assessing the inter-and in-tra-observer agreement were 0.846 and 0.841, respectively. Conclusions: A non-invasive score using noncontrast-en-hanced MRI was developed and proved to be significantly correlated with invasive HVPG. Besides, this score could be used to detect CSPH in patients with cirrhosis.