What’s Good for the Liver

A lesion on the liver can mean any number of things. A complex condition in the liver can be a major problem. Treatment for any condition of the liver will succeed if the detection of the condition is early. Diagnostic imaging procedures such as the PET/CT scans are what are normally used in order to characterize lesions. It’s been recently speculated though that the PET/MRI might actually be better than the PET/CT. As stated in an article published by auntminnie.com “PET/MRI provided better diagnostic confidence due to soft-tissue contrast and complementary information from different MRI sequences.”

The study conducted in order to arrive at this conclusion is the first one conducted for this purpose. According to the study there is more accurate differentiation and the article explained that “MRI offers enhanced soft-tissue contrast and has proved particularly beneficial for patients with small liver lesions. The modality has shown superior results compared to CT and PET/CT for depicting and characterizing liver tumors.” While this is a first study it will be interesting to see if greater samples yield the same results.

All conditions affect people in different ways, when you think of how incredibly different people’s immune systems are. One patient can go through a liver lesion and issue easily while the other could succumb to greater effects almost immediately. The way the study was conducted there were 70 patients enrolled. Of the 70 patients 39 were men while 31 were women. The study was thorough and it employed experienced readers looking at the results of each sub modality and comparing findings.

There is still the fact that it was only 70 people with a median age of 56 with a plus/minus of 14 years. The problem with that is that the variance does not include or factor younger patients. There are too many factors that have yet to be considered to say that the results are a fact. It will be interesting to see if physicians start employing the PET/MRI more as a result of these findings or if more studies will be conducted in the future.

If you have any questions about diagnostic imaging procedures please feel free to give us a call. Our team of dedicated imaging experts here at Clermont Radiology looks forward to answering any questions you may have and helping you with all your imaging needs.