[Pancreatic assessment by magnetic resonance imaging: an improvement in the diagnostic results with new study...

Magnetic resonance imaging of the pancreas has been, limited by a series of artifacts with a resulting poor contrast to noise ratio. Nevertheless, technological progress has allowed to reduce not only scanning time but also the number of artifacts, by increasing the number of excitations and matrix size. Moreover, tissue contrast can now be modified. In our study performed on 5 normal volunteers and 20 patients with different pancreatic diseases conditions, fast SE sequences with and without fat suppression were used, with an overall increase in contrast to noise ratio. In all patients MR images allowed the accurate definition of the lesions: in 8 adenocarcinoma patients the lesion could be depicted, including the 2 lesions CT had poorly demonstrated. Also in the 3 patients with endocrine tumors, MRI depicted small tumors which were later confirmed at surgery. This new protocol makes MRI a very sensitive and accurate tool in the study of neoplastic and inflammatory pancreatic diseases thus, MRI is not only a complementary tool to CT but an even better study technique. In particular, its higher contrast to noise ratio allows a dramatic improvement in the depiction of small solid lesions, especially those not altering pancreatic outline. This study proves that MRI, when adequately performed, is a very accurate tool to study, in a very short time, the pancreas and peripancreatic region, yielding much better results than all the other diagnostic imaging modalities.