MR versus multislice CT cholangiography in evaluating patients with obstruction of the biliary tract

Abstract

MSCT cholangiography can be considered a possible noninvasive alternative to MRC.

Contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance cholangiography with Gd-BOPTA and Gd-EOB-DTPA in healthy subjects

“…Functional abnormalities can be explored by hepatobiliary scintigraphy, whereby a radioactive tracer, 99 Tc m -HIDA, is taken up by hepatocytes and excreted into the biliary system. The same principle can be utilized in biliary-specific contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT cholangiography) (13,25) and biliary-specific contrast-enhanced MR. The advantages of MRC over CT cholangiography are that no radiation is used and there is greater experience of MRC in the literature.…”

Trends in Pre-Liver Transplant Screening for Cholangiocarcinoma among Patients with Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis

“…The authors observed that inflammatory lesions as well as stent areas could show increased uptake of FDG and determined that a maximum standardized uptake value (the ratio of tissue radioactivity to injected dose/body weight) at a cut-off of 3.9 would be reliable in differentiating malignant from benign lesions. As for MSCTC, it has been compared to both ERCP [30] and MRCP [31] and the results suggest that it has potential as an alternative to both, yielding high-resolution images at greater speed and allowing a high-quality, three-dimensional reconstruction of the biliary tree. The utility of MSCTC in the differentiation of benign and malignant strictures in PSC, however, has yet to be thoroughly explored.…”

Early bile duct cancer

“…Papillar y carcinomas were believed to have a more favorable outcome than other histological types in bile duct cancers [39,53] ; however, longer survival was linked with early detection regardless of gross or histological types in patients with early bile duct cancer [4] . In accordance with our notion, Kurosaki et al [9] also found that patients with pT1 papillary carcinoma showed relatively prolonged survival, whereas patients with pT2 or pT3 papillary carcinoma did not show such a long survival.…”

“…The noninvasive nature of magnetic resonance cholangiography (MRC) may play a more important role in diagnosing early bile duct cancer patients because many of these patients are asymptomatic [4] . MRC can facilitate overviews of longitudinal cancer spread by assessing bile ducts upstream and downstream of the tumor simultaneously and permits assessment of the vessels [38,39] . Radiographic findings alone may not distinguish reliably between malignant and benign lesions [40][41][42] .…”