Current techniques and future trends in the diagnosis of hepatic steatosis in liver donors: A review

•The degree of macrosteatosis is intimately related to the viability of the liver graft and correlated with adverse post-liver transplant outcomes., which in turn is crucial to the success of the operation.•A conventional liver biopsy followed by a formal histological analysis has remained the gold standard for the quantification of macrosteatosis, however this procedure is fallible and is an invasive test.•There remains the demand for a non-invasive, portable (hand-held), economical device which can reliably provide real-time readings of the percentage of macrosteatosis.•Novel, non-invasive modalities of quantifying macrosteatosis using various physical principles of fat are in different stages of research, these include Raman spectroscopy, Infra-red spectroscopy and diffuse reflectance spectroscopy.