The Predictive Value of 3D Time-of-Flight MR Angiography in Assessment of Brain Arteriovenous Malformation Obliteration after Radiosurgery

Abstract

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE:The purpose of radiosurgery of bAVMs is complete angiographic obliteration of its nidus. We assessed the diagnostic accuracy of 1.5T T2-weighted MR imaging and TOF-MRA images for detecting nidus obliteration after radiosurgery.

Diagnostic value of 3D time-of-flight MRA in trigeminal neuralgia

“…A SROC curve determines an optimal threshold point capable of differentiating diseased subjects and non-diseased subjects, that is positive or negative tests, respectively, and the AUC value is correlated with the overall performance of the diagnostic test with larger AUC values (closer to 1) indicating greater accuracy, sensitivity and specificity [40]. The AUC measured from the SROC curve is the performance parameter for evaluating utility of a test method in the clinical diagnosis of TN patients, and 3D-TOF-MRA shows high performance [41].…”

Aligning 3D time-of-flight MRA datasets for quantitative longitudinal studies: evaluation of rigid registration techniques

“…Furthermore, Time-of-Flight MRA datasets have also been applied for investigation of radiosurgery success in AVMs [11] and analysis of vascular remodeling in arteriovenous fistulas [12]. In patients with an ischemic stroke, longitudinal TOF image sequences have been used for the analysis of collateral flow patterns [13], or identification of recanalized vessels [14].…”

Reply:

“…As stated in the patient-selection criteria in the paper, we included every patient who underwent radiosurgery for a bAVM in our institution and who was subjected to MR imaging and DSA before and after radiosurgery in the aforementioned sequence. 1 It is, therefore, likely that our data are "enriched" with reference standard-positive cases because bAVMs tend to obliterate after radiosurgery, and most DSAs in our study were performed for the purpose of demonstrating obliteration, suggesting that the prevalence of obliterated bAVMs among our study group was high. However, in general, progressive obliteration should be a characteristic of a population of patients with bAVMs a few years after radiosurgery.…”