Radiology 9 Springer-Verlag New York Inc. 1987 MR Imaging in Hydatid Disease of the Liver

Abstract. We describe the appearance on MR of hydatid disease of the liver in 2 patients. The le-sions were well demonstrated using spin-echo pulse sequences, and could be easily seen with either T1 or T2 weighting; however, maximum information was obtained using both. In these 2 cases, a thin, low signal boundary was noted around the cysts; this finding may prove useful in differential diag-nosis. Key words: Hydatid cysts, diagnosis Liver, mag-netic resonance imaging. Echinococcal hepatic cysts are rarely encountered in the United States, but are more common in cer-tain endemic parts of the world. Although the mag-netic resonance (MR) appearances of common fo-cal liver lesions have been described, to our knowl-edge the MR appearance of echinococcal cysts has not been demonstrated [1-8]. In this report we present 2 such cases. Although other imaging mo-dalities are often sufficient o confirm this diagno-sis, MR may be helpful in difficult cases. In addi-tion, because these lesions are often asymptomatic, they will be found incidentally, and their distinc-tion from other focal lesions is important. Methods Imaging was performed with a Diasonics MT/S system (Milpi-tas, CA) operating at 0.35 tesla, using nongated ual spin-echo pulse sequences. Repetition times (TR) were 0.5, 1.5, and 2.0 sec, and echo delay times (TE) were 28 and 56 msec. Relaxa-tion times were obtained from intensity data using method