Fig. 3: Discriminative performance of liver CUTE speed of sound.

a, b Distribution of controlled attenuation parameter (CAP) and speed-of-sound (SoS) values in normal (black circles) and steatotic (red circles) livers, respectively (n = 22 biologically independent samples in each group). Box boundaries represent the first and third quartiles, the line across the box shows the median, and whiskers indicate the minimum and maximum values excluding outliers (values beyond 1.5 × inter-quartile range). The significance of differences between distributions is assessed with two-tailed Mann–Whitney U test, where **** refers to p < 0.0001. c Correlation between CAP and SoS values using Pearson’s r coefficient. The dashed line illustrates the predicted linear trend. d Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve representing true-positive rates (sensitivity) against false-positive rates (1−specificity) of predicting steatotic versus normal livers based on SoS values. The diagonal line indicates random prediction. The confidence interval (CI) is computed with bootstrapping, illustrated as different realizations of ROC curves in gray, with a total of 1000 realizations. The optimal SoS cut-off value is indicated in orange, with the corresponding sensitivity and specificity. AUC Area under the curve.