In this issue of AJNR (1), Drs Elster and Chen pose a provocative question that has certainly given us pause as we routinely dismiss a large nonenhancing white matter lesion in a cancer patient. It was with relief that we read the conclusion that white matter lesions in cancer patients that do not enhance with gadolinium-DTPA at the time of the initial MR study have a low probability of represe...

and Stroke To the Editor: I read with interest the study by Vermeer and colleagues1 on the risk of stroke associated with MRI-defined white matter lesions (WML) in the Rotterdam Scan Study. As cerebral MRI becomes a routine diagnostic test for widening indications of neurological disorders, this study provides further data on the clinical significance of these lesions in asymptomatic elderly pe...

The natural course of radiation encephalopathy following nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) radiotherapy remains poorly understood. The present study aimed to investigate the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) characteristics and evolution of radiation encephalopathy. A series of 162 follow-up MRI examinations from 68 NPC patients with radiation encephalopathy in the temporal lobes were analyzed retr...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Microvascular lesions are common in brain aging, but their clinical impact is debated. Methodological problems such as the masking effect of concomitant pathologies may explain discrepancies among previous studies. To evaluate the cognitive consequences of such lesions, we prospectively investigated elderly individuals with various degrees of cognitive impairment but with...

PURPOSE In elderly patients, deep and subcortical white matter hyperintense lesions are frequently observed on MRI; however, the growth process of these lesions is unclear. The aims of this retrospective cohort study were to elucidate the growth characteristics of deep and subcortical white matter hyperintense lesions, and to insight their etiology. MATERIALS AND METHODS We enrolled 103 patie...

White matter lesions are common brain abnormalities. In this paper, an automatic method for segmentation of white matter lesions in T1-weighted brain magnetic resonance (MR) images is presented. A patient’s T1-weighted MR image is first segmented into the three major tissue types, white matter (WM), gray matter (GM) and cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) solely based on each voxel’s intensity. Since W...

Intracerebral administration of the excitotoxin ibotenate to newborn mice induces white-matter lesions, mimicking brain lesions that occur in human preterm infants. Nociceptin (NC), also called orphanin FQ, is the endogenous ligand of the opioid receptor-like 1 (ORL1) receptor and does not bind classical high-affinity opioid receptors. In the present study, administration of NC exacerbated ibot...

PURPOSE To investigate the presence of small cystlike structures in the cerebral hemispheric white matter on MR images of patients with tuberous sclerosis. METHODS The MR images of 18 consecutive patients with tuberous sclerosis were reviewed retrospectively. RESULTS Eight of the 18 patients were found to have cystlike structures in the cerebral white matter. The signal intensity of these l...

INTRODUCTION: Quantification of white matter lesion progression is of major interest in MR imaging of the human brain for the diagnosis and monitoring of several diseases like Multiple Sclerosis or Alzheimer’s disease. T1 (T1w) and T2 (T2w) weighted images may provide insufficient tissue contrast for accurate segmentation of lesions. The Fluid Attenuated Inversion Recovery (FLAIR) sequence is o...