A rigorous method for liver biopsy

Liver biopsy is still considered the gold standard for grading, staging and "stad-ging" the chronic liver disease.

In addition, it remains a primary source for acquiring new knowledge on the liver pathology. Demand for precise evaluations of the fibrosis and inflammatory tissue detectable in liver biopsy samples has been fuelled by the need to understand the closest-to-real effects of new antiviral molecules on the lesions characterising the histological patterns of chronic viral, toxic, metabolic and autoimmune diseases. The current scoring systems do not quantify these lesions, but only describe subjective classes of severity labelled with ordinal numbers, and the available automated methods based on observer-computer interactions do not abolish observer subjectivity or use an inadequate measurement unit, and also take too long to analyse entire histological sections.