Role of Diffusion Weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Intracranial Lesions

Abstract

Background

Diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) is used in a wide range of medical diagnosis purpose to evaluate the intracranial pathological conditions. Particularly, this method provides a specificity to obtain the information on conventional sequence analysis.

Materials and Methods

The present study was conducted in the Department of radiodiagnosis, Sri Lakshmi Narayana institute of medical sciences, Puducherry. The study was conducted by the Ethical committee permission and informed consent received from the participants. The conventional MRI and diffusion weighted images of patients (n=50) were analysed and the statistical evaluation was carried out by the software.

Results

Majority of Patients were in age group 61-70years (22%) and mean age was 43 years. No sex preponderance was observed and majority of lesions were in intra-axial (66%) at Frontal Lobe than extra-axial. Many patients showed intracranial neoplastic lesions (38%) and common with metastasis (12%) and Meningioma (10%).  Arachnoid cysts were predominate type of non-neoplastic cystic lesions (10%). We observed that diffusion weighted imaging revealed significantly different ADC values among different intracranial lesions. High grade gliomas having diffusion restriction with reduced ADC values in comparison to Low grade gliomas.

Conclusion

The present study showed that dwi and adc is useful to diagnose intracranial lesions better than the conventional MR imaging.