Special MRI Identifies Brain Cancer Early

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- A special type of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may help find brain cancer earlier than traditional imaging.

Researchers in London find perfusion MRI shows changes in blood volume in the brain that often come before brain tumors turn cancerous. It's able to spot these changes a year or more before other markers of brain cancer can be found.

Primary brain tumors called low-grade gliomas grow slowly over years. Most turn into high-grade gliomas, which have a poor prognosis. Brain tumors can lead to angiogenesis -- the formation of new blood vessels. These abnormal vessels mean changes in blood volume and flow.

During the study, 13 patients with low-grade gliomas had perfusion MRI and contrast-enhanced MRI every six months for up to three years. Researchers wanted to see whether changes in relative cerebral blood volume (rCBV) are an indicator of future cancer.

Results show in the patients with tumor transformation, the mean rCBV increased from 1.94 at the beginning of the study to 3.14 12 months before the transformation to 3.65 six months before the transformation and to 5.36 when the transformation was diagnosed.

The findings suggest significant changes in rCBV are an important marker of malignant change in gliomas and reflect the earliest stages of the transformation process. The study also shows perfusion MRI can detect these changes long before the traditional contrast-enhanced MR images can.

"We have shown that perfusion MRI provides a noninvasive means of assessing the risk of transformation in individual patients," study co-author Adam Waldman, Ph.D., was quoted as saying. "Increasing perfusion can be regarded as an early warning sign of impending malignant transformation that can assist radiologists in identifying those patients most likely to benefit from earlier or more aggressive treatment."

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SOURCE: Radiology, 2008;247