• Benign Lesions
• Malignant lesions
  • Hepatucellolar carcinoma (HCC)
  • Metastatic liver tumor
  • Cholangiocellular carcinoma
  • Clinical utility

Clinical utility

Liver cancer is the sixth most common cancer and, owing to its very poor prognosis, the third commonest cause of cancer-related death Precise pre-surgery imaging techniques allow stratification of patients for surgery, minimal-invasive imaging-guided therapy or pharmaceutical treatment. The presence, number, character and type of lesions are factors that are used to match patients with their most appropriate treatment. Contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging is widely regarded as the most reliable test for liver lesion characterization.

Diagnosis of focal liver disease

An ideal diagnostic tool in liver diagnosis is requested to precisely detect, localize and characterize liver lesions. Besides precise differentiation between benign and malignant lesions, perfect delineation for surgical planning is required.

Frequently, patients with extra-hepatic malignant disease show focal liver lesions that are benign and require no treatment More accurate imaging can avoid unnecessary surgery as has been shown by Zech et al. 2009. They compared Primovist^® enhanced MRI to three-phase multidetector CT and extracellular contrast media-enhanced MRI. The proportions of patients who were classified to the categories “resectable high-risk”, “unresectable” and “no malignant lesions found” where higher with Primovist^® MRI than with the compared detection methods. Following classification the rate of intra-operatively detected unresectable patients was lower following Primovist^® MRI.

Treatment planning

Economically, more accurate imaging allows less time and money consuming pre-operative planning. Zech et al. found that surgical planning was also more efficient with Primovist^® MRI, as the frequency of changes in operative plans during surgery was lower.

Patients benefit from diagnostic accuracy and early treatment decision with regard to both life expectancy and quality of life.

Follow up

After surgery or during pharmaceutical treatment consequent monitoring of treatment success requires not only that the imaging technique is well tolerated. MRI with contrast media especially improves conspicuity for small lesions (<1cm).