FibroQ: An Easy and Useful Noninvasive Test for Predicting Liver Fibrosis in Patients with Chronic Viral Hepatitis

Background: Liver biopsy–the gold standard in assessing liver histology–is recommended before all antiviral treatment. However, this procedure may cause complica-tions, is costly, and is limited by sampling errors. Hence, noninvasive tests have been proposed to assess the severity of hepatic fibrosis. We propose a novel noninvasive index for predicting liver fibrosis, named fibro-quotient (FibroQ), and compared the diagnostic accuracies of FibroQ, aspartate aminotransferase (AST)-to-platelet ratio index (APRI), and AST/alanine aminotransferase (ALT) ratio (AAR). Methods: This retrospective cohort study included 140 consecutive patients with chronic viral hepatitis who had undergone percutaneous liver biopsy befor