Magnetic-resonance-guided biopsy of focal liver lesions

Image-guided biopsy techniques are widely used in clinical practice. Commonly used methods employ either ultrasound (US) or computed tomography (CT) for image guidance. In certain patients, US or CT guidance may be suboptimal, or even impossible, because of artifacts, suboptimal lesion visualization, or both. We recently began performing magnetic resonance (MR)-guided biopsy of focal liver lesions in select pediatric patients with lesions that are not well visualized by US or CT. This report describes our experience performing MR-guided biopsy of focal liver lesions, with case examples to illustrate innovative techniques and novel aspects of these procedures.