Prospective Observation for Serial Changes of Acute Intracranial Artery Dissection Using High Resolution MRI

Overview

Intracranial artery disease has been more detected with development of HR-MR. HR-MR can depict vascular wall directly and give us more information beyond the pre-existing imaging modalities such as digital subtraction angiography, magnetic resonance angiography, computed tomography angiography. Hence, HR-MR is considered to become promising imaging modality for intracranial artery disease and many studies have been published recently. However, there was not enough to differentiate various intracranial artery disease such as atherosclerosis, dissection, moyamoya disease, vasculitis, reversible vasoconstriction syndrome. In real clinical arena, intracranial artery disease is too difficult to diagnose and distinguish among the disease. Of the disease, usefulness of HR-MR has been consistently published in the detection and diagnosis of intracranial artery dissection recently. HR-MR seems to be the most important and reliable imaging method in intracranial artery dissection as of now. Therefore, intracranial artery dissection is necessary to study using HR-MR. Intracranial artery dissection is dynamic vascular pathology. The geometric change is the most common among intracranial artery disease. However, there was no report about the geometric change in HR-MR. The investigators acquired retrospective data about the natural course of intracranial artery dissection in HR-MR and are preparing for publishing an article. However, the data is not prospective and not intraindividual comparison. Therefore, reliability is not enough to convince the natural course. If the investigators got prospective and intraindividual data, definite natural course of intracranial artery dissection could be acquired and would be helpful to diagnose the dissection and differentiate from other vascular pathologies. The prospective longitudinal information from this study could guide us as the important map on the confusing HR-MR findings. The protocols for imaging are as follows: initial (optional), 1 month, 3 month, 6 month (optional), 12 month.

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