MRI neurography and diffusion tensor imaging of a sciatic perineuroma in a child

Abstract

Perineuroma, rare in children, presents as a painless mononeuropathy of a major nerve trunk. Resection of the lesion with end-to-end sural nerve grafting appears to be the treatment of choice. This technique is not recommended if the unhealthy segment of nerve is too long or if spinal roots are involved. However, in children, reports of direct MR evaluation of nerve trunks and of the exiting nerve roots are limited. We report a 7-year-old girl with an intramural sciatic nerve perineuroma in whom the diagnosis was made by MRI and confirmed by biopsy. The MR protocol combining 3-D T2-W STIR SPACE, fat-saturated gadolinium-enhanced T1-W images, and diffusion tensor imaging with tractography was a valuable tool for depicting peripheral nerve and roots in order to plan surgical treatment.

MRI-guided focused ultrasound ablation of lumbar medial branch nerve: Feasibility and safety study in a swine model

“…Due to the limited sensitivity of the body coil, visualization of the MB nerve was not feasible during the in vivo experiments. Developing FUS-compatible RF coils and increasing the sensitivity of MR neurography techniques [12, 28, 29] is essential to leveraging the superior imaging capabilities of MRI for this application. MR thermometry was valuable in this application as it depicted temperature changes in muscle adjacent to the bone.…”

Architectural configuration and microstructural properties of the sacral plexus: A diffusion tensor MRI and fiber tractography study

“…Although DTI is typically used for investigating white matter fiber pathways of the brain, other research areas are being explored opening new avenues for clinical in vivo applications. Fiber tracking of peripheral nerves is one of these fields (Hiltunen et al, 2005;Merlini et al, 2008Merlini et al, , 2011Takagi et al, 2009;Vargas et al, 2008Vargas et al, , 2010. Recently, interest has been shown to image L5 and S1 lumbar nerves in healthy volunteers and patients suffering from disc herniation (Balbi et al, 2011).…”

Diffusivity Measurements Differentiate Benign from Malignant Lesions in Patients with Peripheral Neuropathy or Plexopathy

“…Long-term follow-up imaging rather than biopsy was more often performed for lesions with benign features on conventional imaging, introducing a bias, because biopsy was performed on all lesions that ultimately received a malignant diagnosis but on only a subset of lesions receiving a benign diagnosis. Finally, rare entities such as perineuroma 24 and posttraumatic neuroma appear as mass lesions of the peripheral nerves, but were not included within our study population.…”