State of the art in abdominal MRI structured reporting: a review

Abstract

In the management of several abdominal disorders, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has the potential to significantly improve patient’s outcome due to its diagnostic accuracy leading to more appropriate treatment choice. However, its clinical value heavily relies on the quality and quantity of diagnostic information that radiologists manage to convey through their reports. To solve issues such as ambiguity and lack of comprehensiveness that can occur with conventional narrative reports, the adoption of structured reporting has been proposed. Using a checklist and standardized lexicon, structured reports are designed to increase clarity while assuring that all key imaging findings related to a specific disorder are included. Unfortunately, structured reports have their limitations too, such as risk of undue report simplification and poor template plasticity. Their adoption is also far from widespread, and probably the ideal balance between radiologist autonomy and report consistency of has yet to be found. In this article, we aimed to provide an overview of structured reporting proposals for abdominal MRI and of works assessing its value in comparison to conventional free-text reporting. While for several abdominal disorders there are structured templates that have been endorsed by scientific societies and their adoption might be beneficial, stronger evidence confirming their imperativeness and added value in terms of clinical practice is needed, especially regarding the improvement of patient outcome.

Author response to the Letter to Editor on Chest CT in COVID-19 patients: Structured vs conventional reporting

“…Finally, we agree that SR, intended as a disease-specific template, based on current scientific evidence and developed together with referring physicians, represents a viable option for radiology reports in several applications [4].…”

Deep Learning Whole‐Gland and Zonal Prostate Segmentation on a Public MRI Dataset

“…Indeed, scientific evidence strongly support the adoption of structured reporting for prostate MRI and suggest that the final report should include clinically relevant quantitative data such as PV and PSAd levels. 33,34 Current guidelines recommend estimating PV (and thus PSAd levels) using the maximum diameters measurements and the ellipsoid formula. 11 While this method is fairly accurate in most scenarios and takes radiologists a relatively small time to obtain PV, an automated computation based on whole-gland segmentation would be more efficient and could easily allow to implement structured reporting systems that provide PV and PSAd even before the entire scan is completed since it relies exclusively on axial T 2 -weighted images.…”

Chest CT in COVID-19 patients: Structured vs conventional reporting

“…Nevertheless, it is reasonable to expect similar results with a modified SR template specifically designed for COVID-19 suspicion. Finally, we did not explore the effect of a real-life implementation of SRs and we were not able to perform a direct correlation of SRs impact on patient outcome, which is a common limitation of preliminary SRs studies [ 30 ].…”