Pulse Sequence SWI/SWAN in Diagnosis of Microhemorrhage and Cerebral Vascular Micromalformations

Conventional neuroimaging techniques (MRI, CT) have difficulties in brain microhemorrhage diagnosis. Application of new MRI modalities has significantly improved detection and qualitative assessment of microbleedings in different brain regions. Susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI or SWAN) refers to such technologies. SWI (or SWAN) has been more sensitive in microhemorrhages detection compared with conventional T₂ * pulse sequence. We retrospectively assessed the ability of SWAN pulse sequence in detection of brain microhemorrhages caused by different reasons (hypertensive microangiopathy, amyloid microangiopathy, mild and severe traumatic brain injury, etc.). We compared the obtained SWAN results with conventional 2D T₂ *-weighted pulse sequence and CT data in cases when it was possible to do. The results have demonstrated high sensitivity and accuracy of SWAN in assessment of location, amount and distribution of brain microhemorrhages compared with CT and conventional MRI, including 2D T₂ *-weighted imaging. We recommend to include SWI (or SWAN) pulse sequence into the primary brain MRI protocol in patients with different pathologies.

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