**8. The advantages of TE in liver steatosis, fibrosis and cirrhosis diagnosis**

Compared with other diagnosis indicators or predictive models based on lab tests, the eval‐ uation of fibrosis using elastography has some important advantages [98,99]:


**•** The liver volume used to evaluate fibrosis is 150-400 times higher than the volume ob‐ tained through liver biopsy.

As far as the evaluation of liver steatosis is concerned, in comparison to other modalities, CAP is non-invasive, quantitative, non-ionizing, and inexpensive. Furthermore, the proce‐ dure is easy to perform, even by an operator who does not have any radiological skills and provides immediate results. The procedure is also machine-independent and does not re‐ quire corrections to be made for gain, frequency, focusing or beam diffraction, and is also not subject to operator interpretation. In addition, CAP has been shown to efficiently detect steatosis at a level of ≥ 10%, which is more sensitive than other imaging modalities. Com‐ pared to a liver biopsy, CAP is less prone to sampling error as it explores a liver volume ∼100 times larger [92, 93].
