Abstract
Background; Magnetic resonance urography (MRU) is a new technique using heavily weighted T2 images. The present study described the clinical usefulness of MRU.
Patients and Methods; Twenty-seven patients with urinary tract obstruction and 2 patients without obstruction underwent MRU. The urogram was reconstracted by means of maximum intensity projection method and multiplanar reformation method. As imaging examinations, intravenous urography (IVU) and retrograde pyelography (RP) were conducted in 22 and 11 patients, respectively. The quality of the images was subjectively classified into4grades (grade 0 to 3).
Results; In the comparison of IVU to MRU, 9 patients whose urinary tracts were not identifiable or slightly identifiable (grade 0 or 1) by IVU showed grade 2.5 in the average in MRU. The average grade obtained by MRU was 2.6 in the patients whose urinary tracts were not clearly shown by RP.
Conclusions; MRU provides an alternative to conventional imagings of urinary tract, especially in the cases in which only poor images are obtained by IVU. Although MRU cannot completely replace RP, it is useful to identify the location of the urinary tract disease, which is unidentifiable by RP.
