DETECTABILITY AND APPEARANCE OF BILE-DUCT CALCULUS ON MR-IMAGING OF THE ABDOMEN USING AXIAL T1-WEIGHTED AND T2-WEIGHTED SEQUENCES

This is a retrospective study with the objective of assessing the appe arance and detectability of bile duct calculi on axial abdominal magne tic resonance imaging (MRI). Axial spin-echo (SE) T1-weighted and Turb o-spin-echo (TSE) T2-weighted images of the upper abdomen of 23 patien ts suffering from acute cholangitis with known bile duct calculi mere retrospectively analysed. Bile duct calculi could be visualized on a T 1-weighted SE sequence in 10 (47%) patients. T2-weighted TSE images id entified bile duct calculi in 20) (87%) patients. On the T1-weighted s equence, eight out of 10 (80%) visualized common duct stones mere slig htly hyperintense compared to bile. On T2-weighted sequence, 27 out of 34 (79%) detectable common duct stones were uniformly hypointense com pared to bile, but seven stones (21%) had mixed signal intensity.