Liver disease is a major burden of disease and mortality and now present as the second leading cause of working life years lost. Ideally, general practitioners would detect advanced alcohol-related liver fibrosis at an asymptomatic stage, to allow for curative alcohol-rehabilitation and timely referral to specialist care. But inaccurate diagnostic tools causes under-referrals of affected patients and futile investigations in many who never will develop advanced disease. Existing simple diagnostic scores have better diagnostic accuracy than their individual routine liver blood test components. However, they were made for hand calculations and rely on dichotomized cut-off values which fail to capture complex, nonlinear relationships in the data.
A simple and clinically useful decision aid to detect advanced liver fibrosis is not yet available for general practitioners and non-hepatology specialists. The advanced LiverPRO algorithm based on routine liver blood tests have high accuracy for diagnosing advanced liver fibrosis in both development and validation cohort. By using computer programming, advanced algorithms can be combined with a rapid response. Instead of using cut-offs, percentage risk of having advanced fibrosis is thought to be a better tool for the primary physician and can be used as a pedagogical aid.
The project duration is 2022-2025.