Assessment of hemorrhage and paramagnetic substance accumulation in brain metastases by susceptibility weighted imaging

Objective: We aimed to make a differential diagnosis of brain metastases by using the percentage of the ITSS by the SWI sequence.Method: MR images of 77 patients with intracerebral metastases were evaluated in this study who had breast carcinoma (BC)(n=23), malignant melanoma (MM)(n=4), lung cancer (LC) (n=42), and gastrointestinal adenocancer (GIA)(n=8) as the primary tumor. We calculated the ratio of the ITSS pixels.Results: ITSS percentages of metastases were found 22.52% in LC, 47.61% in GIA, 11.85% in BC, and 60.75% in MM. In terms of differential diagnosis of the ITSS percentages measured in the SWI sequence, the diagnostic performance was very good between MM-BC, good between MM-LC, GIA-LC, and GIA-BC, and poor between LC-BC and GIA-MM. Percentages of ITSS had high sensitivity and specificity to make a differential diagnosis between GIA-LC, GIA-BC, MM-BC, and MM-LC.Conclusions: We conclude that measuring the ITSS percentage values of metastases when evaluating brain masses by MRI will provide valuable additional information for differential diagnosis.

[No abstract available]