**1. Introduction**

### **1.1. The importance of non-invasive evaluation of liver steatosis and fibrosis in virus C infected patients**

Chronic conditions of the liver represent an important public health issue. Whatever the na‐ ture of the aggression against the liver, it seems that it always follows the same pattern: in‐ flamation -> necrosis -> healing (fibrosis) -> regeneration (cirrhosis) -> dysplasia -> hepatocellular carcinoma. An important link in this course of events is represented by fibro‐ genesis. On the other hand, there are more and more evidence that, in patients with chronic hepatitis C, steatosis is a risk factor independently associated with necroinflammatory activ‐ ity and fibrosis progression.

At the moment, the gold standard in the evaluation of both liver fibrosis and steatosis is rep‐ resented by liver biopsy (LB), an invasive method with possible side effects. As a result, most of the research done worldwide is focused towards developing other alternative, noninvasive diagnosis methods, that would be capable to evaluate fibrosis and steatosis as accu‐ rately as possible.

Therefore, the following pages will present an evaluation of unidimensional transient elas‐ tography (TE) performance in the assessment of liver fibrosis and steatosis in patients suffer‐ ing from chronic viral hepatitis type C (HCV).

© 2012 Lupsor et al.; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2012 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
