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Updated: May 19, 2026
Assessing Cortical Cerebral Microinfarcts on High Resolution MR Images
Published on: November 20, 2015
Evaluation of intracranial aneurysms with high-resolution MR angiography using single-artery highlighting technique:
1Institute of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, The Sixth Affiliated People's Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
Purpose:
The authors investigated the effectiveness of high-resolution magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) using a single-artery highlighting technique for the accurate diagnosis of intracranial aneurysms at 3.0 T in a large cohort of patients with suspected intracranial aneurysms against the current gold standard, i.e. cerebral angiography.
Methods:
A total of 307 patients with suspected aneurysms were referred for three-dimensional time-of-flight MRA (3D-TOF-MRA) prior to digital subtraction angiography (DSA). We summarised patient-based, aneurysm-based and vessel-based diagnostic performance parameters, namely, accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), and negative predictive value (NPV) for detecting intracranial aneurysms with 3D-TOF-MRA. Interobserver agreement was calculated with the kappa (κ) statistic.
Results:
Patient-based accuracy was 98.1%, sensitivity 99.5%, specificity 95.3%, PPV 97.6% and NPV 99% according to observer A; and 97.7%, 99.5%, 94.3%, 97.1% and 99%, respectively, according to observer B. Aneurysmbased accuracy was 98.3%, sensitivity 99.6%, specificity 95.2%, PPV 98.1% and NPV 99% according to observer A, and 98.0%, 99.6%, 94.3%, 97.7% and 99%, respectively, according to observer B. Vessel-based accuracy was 99.0%, sensitivity 99.6%, specificity 98.7%, PPV 97.8%, and NPV 99.7% according to observer A, and 98.9%, 99.6%, 98.5%, 97.3%, and 99.7%, respectively, according to observer B. Interobserver reading differences were not significant. The interobserver agreement was good, with a kappa (κ) value of 0.931 for patient-based evaluation, 0.934 for aneurysmbased evaluation and 0.953 for vessel-based evaluation.
Conclusions:
Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of high-resolution MRA using a single-artery-highlighting technique for accurate diagnosis of intracranial aneurysms in a large cohort of patients with suspected aneurysms.
