Dear Colleagues,

Chronic liver diseases (CLDs) such as fibrosis and cancer are an enormous global burden as they are major causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. CLD originates from a variety of causes such as viral hepatitis, metabolic dysfunction, as well as alcohol abuse and autoimmune disease. Biopsy as the imperfect gold standard for diagnosis and staging of CLD has many limitations such as invasiveness, procedure-associated risks, limited representativeness for the entire organ, sampling error and inter- and intra-observer sampling variability with relatively high error rates even for diagnosis of advanced stages of liver fibrosis. Clinical imaging techniques, such as computed tomography (CT), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), can detect established disease in the liver but are less sensitive at detecting early-stage disease, and cannot distinguish active disease (fibrogenesis) from stable scar, therefore, earlier detection strategies are urgently needed to enable earlier interventions. Molecular imaging enables visualization of biological processes and pathological alterations at a cellular and molecular level in a noninvasive and quantitative manner and it can be used for early detection, staging, prognosis, disease activity and heterogeneity and treatment response in CLD to help to improve patient stratification, outcome for new therapies and eventually the care of patients.

In this Special Issue, we hope to encourage submissions of original articles and reviews covering development of various molecular imaging techniques and probes for imaging biomarkers in clinical and preclinical models of liver diseases and their potential clinical implications. The imaging methods include, but are not limited to MRI, nuclear imaging (PET, SPECT/CT), ultrasound and optical techniques.

Dr. Mani Salarian
Guest Editor

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• Chronic Liver Disease
• Fibrosis
• Cancer
• Molecular Imaging
• Probes
• Biomarker