[Clinical usefulness of diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging in patients with ischemic cerebrovascular disease].

: Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging was performed to determine the detectability of ischemic changes in patients with ischemic cerebrovascular disease. We retrospectively reviewed 103 patients with symptoms suggestive of ischemic cerebrovascular disease. All patients underwent computed tomography, routine magnetic resonance imaging, and diffusion-weighted imaging. Of 103 patients, 18 were imaged within 3 hours after onset, 57 were imaged between 3 and 24 hours, and 29 were imaged between 24 and 144 hours. Eighty-eight patients were diagnosed as ischemic cerebrovascular disease. Magnetic resonance imaging was performed at a 1.0 Tesla clinical machine using single-shot spin-echo/echo-planar imaging sequence. In each case, three sets of DWI with motion-probing gradient pulses in the x, y, and z directions were taken. The detectability of ischemic changes of each imaging modality was compared. DWI detected ischemic changes in 83 of 88 cases with clinical diagnoses of cerebral ischemia(sensitivity; 94.3%). In contrast, DWI showed negative findings in 15 of the 15 patients with diagnoses other than cerebral ischemia(selectivity; 100.0%). DWI detected ischemic changes in 16 out of 18 patients(88.6%) within 3 hours after the onset. In contrast, T 2-weighted image did not detect any ischemic changes in the same period. These results suggest that DWI is considered to be highly useful for the early diagnosis of cerebral ischemia.