Detection and Measurement of Intracranial Aneurysm Compared between Magnetic Resonance Intracranial Black Blood Vessel Imaging and Gold Standard Cerebral Digital Subtraction Angiography

Background Magnetic resonance intracranial black blood vessel imaging (MR-IBBVI) is a new noninvasive method for evaluating intracranial vessel wall pathology. No previous studies have investigated the efficacy of MR-IBBVI to determine aneurysm size. We aimed to identify the precise diagnosis of MR-IBBVI for the detection and measurement of intracranial aneurysm compared with gold standard cerebral digital subtraction angiography (cDSA). Materials and Methods The retrospective study collected patients of precoiled or postcoiled intracranial aneurysm who were treated at our institute from January 2012 to June 2019 and who had MR-IBBVI, cDSA imaging, and/or three-dimensional time-of-flight sequence of magnetic resonance angiography. The sensitivity and specificity of aneurysm detection by MR-IBBVI and the accuracy of MR-IBBVI for measuring the aneurysm and vessel size were calculated. Results One hundred and twenty patients (61% female) with 132 aneurysms were included into this study. The mean aneurysm size was 5.3 mm (range: 2.2–22.6). Sensitivity and specificity of MR-IBBVI to detect a small aneurysm were 98.74 and 91.21%, respectively. No statistically significant results were observed between MR-IBBVI and DSA for aneurysm detection or any of the evaluated measurement parameters. Conclusion MR-IBBVI is an accurate and highly sensitive method to detect and evaluate the size of an intracranial aneurysm both before and after coiling.