Purpose: Many inner ear disorders, including Ménière's disease, are believed to be based on endolymphatic hydrops. We evaluated a newly proposed method for semi-quantification of endolymphatic size in patients with suspected endolymphatic hydrops that uses 2 kinds of processed magnetic resonance (MR) images.
Methods: Twenty-four consecutive patients underwent heavily T₂-weighted (hT₂W) MR cisternography (MRC), hT₂W 3-dimensional (3D) fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) with inversion time of 2250 ms (positive perilymph image, PPI), and hT₂W-3D-IR with inversion time of 2050 ms (positive endolymph image, PEI) 4 hours after intravenous administration of single-dose gadolinium-based contrast material (IV-SD-GBCM). Two images were generated using 2 new methods to process PPI, PEI, and MRC. Three radiologists contoured the cochlea and vestibule on MRC, copied regions of interest (ROIs) onto the 2 kinds of generated images, and semi-quantitatively measured the size of the endolymph for the cochlea and vestibule by setting a threshold pixel value.
Results: Each observer noted a strong linear correlation between endolymphatic size of both the cochlea and vestibule of the 2 kinds of generated images. The Pearson correlation coefficients (r) were 0.783, 0.734, and 0.800 in the cochlea and 0.924, 0.930, and 0.933 in the vestibule (P<0.001, for all). In both the cochlea and vestibule, repeated-measures analysis of variance showed no statistically significant difference between observers.
Conclusion: Use of the 2 kinds of generated images generated from MR images obtained 4 hours after IV-SD-GBCM might enable semi-quantification of endolymphatic size with little observer dependency.