Poster Exhibit 2nd: Thursday, 7 October – Saturday, 9 October

Introduction: Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has been used in many brain studies with the aim to find differences between controls and different kinds of brain illness. These studies go from psychiatric disorders to brain tumours. In these studies it is possible to see imaging that look normal to totally abnormal. Actually it is unclear the utility or not of this sequence as a clinical one, in the sense to use it routinely, because it is unclear if it adds new information to the usual imaging. Here we presented some clinical patients, who came with different diagnostics, who had “normal” brain imaging, where as “normal” we mean that a radiologist defined it as normal, but with an abnormal FA pattern, easy to see in a common FA imaging. The processing was done with the software provided by the scanner manufacturer. We concluded that sometimes the DTI helps to find some abnormal regions in epilepsy patients unseen in classical imaging. In traumatic and psychiatric patients FA show much more abnormal affected regions, unobserved in other sequence. Methods: 7 patients were scanned in a 3 T o 1.5 T GE scanner with a commercial 8 channel brain coil. The sequences and spatial orientation depended on the type of pathology to study, but in general it consist of 2D T2, T1 and Flair imaging, a 3D SPGR T1, GRE, a high resolution T2 in hippocampus in epilepsy protocol and a DTI. The DTI acquisition were made with 55 directions, 24-25 cm FOV (depending head size), b=1000 mm/ seg2, TR:1000 mseg,, and a thickness slice of 3 mm in 3T and 4 mm in 1.5 T (8:30 min aprox). Epilepsy patients had spectroscopy acquisitions in both hippocampus. Total scanner time 11:15 hs.. DTI post-processing was made with Functool the GE software to post processing functional studies Conclusion: Being DTI a relative new sequence in the group of MR imaging, this sequence it is not used routinely in brain studies, mainly as it seems not to give additional information. In this presentation we showed the utility to perform DTI acquisitions as FA imaging add new information in some diseases like traumatic and psychiatric disorder. It also helps to find a lesion or possible epileptic origin in epilepsy patients that could not be seen in common MRI imaging. We also believe that as the FA imaging could be unfamiliar to radiologist, learn to interpret DTI imaging is the principal stage to consider before making some assumptions