Yonago Acta medica 1996;39:163–170
Assessment of the Image Quality and Tumor Detectability of Breath-Hold T2-Weighted Imaging of Liver Tumors using a Fast Gradient MR System
Kotaro Yoshida, Yuji Suto, Shuji Sugihara and Yukiko Tokuda
Department of Radiology, Faculty of Medicine, Tottori University, Yonago 683, Japan
Fourteen patients with various types of focal liver tumors were imaged with turbo spin-echo (TSE), breath-hold TSE (BH-TSE) and half-Fourier single-shot TSE (HASTE) pulse sequences using a fast gradient magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system. We compared the T2-weighted images of the liver with the TSE, BH-TSE, HASTE and conventional spin-echo (SE) pulse sequences in order to determine whether those fast T2-weighted images, including fat suppressed images, could replace SE images. In quantitative and qualitative analysis, the fast T2-weighted images were slightly superior to the SE images, but they were inferior in the conspicuousness of liver tumor to the SE images. These findings suggest that the fast T2-weighted images can shorten the examination time of the liver MRI, but cannot replace the T2-weighted SE images because of the low conspicuousness.
Key words: breath-hold MRI; fast gradient; T2-weighted image; liver tumor
