Advanced magnetic resonance imaging in evaluation of glioma

SUMMARY

Glioma is the most common primary cerebral tumor which has a poor prognosis, high disability and fatalityespecially in high grade gliomas. The current standard of imaging technique for evaluating glioma is conventional MRI. Basic cMRI sequences are T1W, T2W, FLAIR, T1W+Gd. Conventional MRI provides critical clinical information about gliomas. Unfortunately, conventional MRI is nonspecificity, not reflect the complicated biology, has a limited capacity to grading and differentiate gliomas from other pathologies such as: inflammation,MS… Recently, there is a development of many new MRI techniques and these application have increased such as diffusion-weighted imaging, diffusion-tensor, tractography, perfusion, spectroscopy and functional MRI. These techniques provided complementary information to cMRI for assessing tumor in cellularity, white matter invasion, hypoxia, necrosis, vascularization, permeability and relation tumor with functional areas. They give more accurate in diagnosis, planning pre-surgery and monitoring post-therapy. This lecture introduces an principle and clinical application of these advanced MRI techniques in cerebral gliomas which were performed at Choray hospital.

Keywords: Glioma, conventional MRI, diffusion-weighted, diffusion-tensor, tractography, perfusion, spectroscopy, functional MRI.