ArticleQuantitative imaging in medicine and surgery2026
Performance of free-breathing contrast-enhanced and unenhanced stack-of-spirals ultrashort echo time MRI for lung follow-up in patients with malignancies at 1.5T.
Article in Quantitative imaging in medicine and surgery, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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Abstract
Background: Stack-of-spirals ultrashort echo time (spiral-UTE) has been reported to be feasible for lung imaging; however, the performance of free-breathing contrast-enhanced and unenhanced spiral-UTE (UTEe and UTEu) is still unknown. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate their performance of lung imaging in patients with malignant tumors. Methods: A total of 76 patients with malignancies suspected of pulmonary metastatic nodules were enrolled in free-breathing UTEe, UTEu and routine contrast-enhanced T1-weighted imaging [volumetric interpolated breath-hold examination (VIBE)] for lung follow-up. Two radiologists independently assessed the image quality, and qualitative analysis was scored via a 5-point scale (4, excellent; 0, unreadable) with respect to the visibility of fissures, airways and vessels; signal homogeneity; motion artifacts; lesion conspicuity; and overall image quality. Quantitative analysis included measurements of the apparent contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and apparent signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Pulmonary nodules detected via magnetic resonance (MR) images were compared with those by computed tomography (CT) as the reference standard. Results: Both UTEu and UTEe outperformed VIBE in all the qualitative metrics (P<0.001) and there was no significant difference between UTEu and UTEe (P>0.05) in those metrics. UTEe exhibited the best performance in depicting pulmonary vessels, achieving the highest apparent SNR and apparent CNR values. Among the 130 pulmonary nodules identified via CT, spiral-UTE had a sensitivity of 76.9% and a positive predictive value (PPV) of 99.0%, significantly outperforming VIBE (sensitivity of 47.7% and PPV of 95.4%). The detection rates for spiral-UTE were 90.0% for nodules larger than 5 mm, 98.5% for nodules larger than 7 mm and 100.0% for nodules larger than 10 mm. Conclusions: Spiral-UTE demonstrated superior image quality and greater sensitivity for pulmonary nodule detection than breath-hold VIBE did. Both unenhanced and enhanced spiral-UTE showed comparable performance in nodule detection, highlighting its potential as a reliable imaging modality for patients with malignant tumors during follow-up imaging.
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