Comparative Study of Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy with Histopathology in Characterization of Intracranial Tumor

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Neuroimaging plays an essential role in the diagnosis of brain tumors. MRI without and with gadolinium contrast is the current standard of care imaging procedure for brain tumors. This study tried to find the efficacy of MRI and MRS in preoperative diagnosis of intracranial tumors and to determine its diagnostic accuracy compared with histopathological findings.

METHOD: A cross sectional hospital based analysis to assess the radiological diagnosis with final histopathology report was done. MRI & MRS findings were assessed and radiological impression were compared with their histopathological diagnosis, which is considered gold standard, thereby kappa value of agreement, sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, PPV and NPV of MRI and MRS were calculated.

RESULT: Total number of patient with intracranial tumour in our study was 48. Average age of the patient was 42.521 ± 18.2861 with range of 8-82 years. Astrocytoma was found to be most prevalent accounting 29.2% (14), followed by meningioma comprising 22.9% (11) and then pituitary adenoma accounting 14.6 % (7) on radiological diagnosis. Out of 48 cases histopathological diagnosis of 46 (95.8%) cases came to be same as radiological diagnosis. There was near perfect agreement of radiological diagnosis of the intracranial tumors with overall agreement of 0.949. Overall sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, PPV and NPV was 91.11%, 99.64%, 99.30%, 87.50% and 99.58% respectively.

CONCLUSION: MRI and MRS has almost perfect agreement in diagnosis of intracranial tumor compared with histopathology.

KEYWORDS: Histopathology, intracranial tumors, MRI, MRS