A study to access the correlation between serum alpha fetoprotein and radiological image finding in patients with malignant liver mass

Abstract

Malignant liver mass remains a major health problem worldwide. Patients with chronic liver disease, the accuracy of ultrasound scan (US), spiral computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) in diagnosing hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and malignant liver disease is assessed in this study. This study helps to find out the significance of serum alpha protein in patients with malignant liver mass. Ret-rospective cross-sectional study was done on patients with malignant liver mass. A total of 62 patients were diagnosed with malignant liver mass, out of which 44 are male, and 18 were female. They were grouped into three age groups 30-50 years, 51-70 years and above 70 years. In this study, out of the radiologically diagnosed malignant liver mass, HPE has proven hepato-cellular carcinoma where 67.7% and liver secondaries where 29.03%. 55% of malignant liver mass has raised alpha feto proteins. 74% of HCC diagnosed and confirmed on biopsy have elevated alpha feto proteins. Only 11% of mul-tiple malignant liver lesions have elevated alpha feto proteins.AFP receptors are expressed only in the AFP-positive HCC tissues. In the AFP-negative HCC, the rate of tumour growth would probably be expected to be relatively slow, and tumour staging might be lower than in AFP-positive. Based on this study, radiological imaging has been very useful in the diagnosis of various malignant liver masses in both elevated and normal AFP.