What is a blooming artifact on MRI?

Blooming artifact is a susceptibility artifact encountered on some MRI sequences in the presence of paramagnetic substances that affect the local magnetic milieux.

What is a swan image in MRI?

T2 star-weighted angiography (SWAN), or susceptibility-weighted angiography is a new, high-resolution 3D multi-echo gradient echo sequence that produces weighted averaging across images with different echo times (TEs) to achieve higher susceptibility weighting.

What shows up bright white on an MRI?

On a T1-weighted scans show tissues with high fat content (such as white matter) appear bright and compartments filled with water (CSF) appears dark. This is good for demonstrating anatomy.

How can you tell the difference between a bleed and calcification on an MRI?

Recent advances have suggested that MR imaging may help differentiate calcifications from hemorrhages on the basis of their tissue magnetic susceptibilities. Although calcifications are diamagnetic relative to brain parenchyma, most blood-related products, such as deoxyhemoglobin and hemosiderin, are paramagnetic (7).

What causes blooming artifact?

Blooming artifact is caused by limited spatial resolution, which is associated with the design tradeoffs between image noise and resolution, and with the partial volume averaging of different densities within a single voxel.

What is an example of an artifact?

Examples include stone tools, pottery vessels, metal objects such as weapons and items of personal adornment such as buttons, jewelry and clothing. Natural objects, such as fire cracked rocks from a hearth or plant material used for food, are classified by archaeologists as ecofacts rather than as artefacts.

What is bright SW?

The bright region in the gradient echo weighted image shows the area affected in this acute stroke example. The arrows in the SWI image may show the tissue at risk that has been affected by the stroke (A, B, C) and the location of the stroke itself (D).

What is a swan in a brain?

SWAN helps clearly delineate small blood vessels, microbleeds, and large vascular structures in the brain. SWAN is also designed to visualize iron and calcium deposits by providing both phase and magnitude images to aid in an easier diagnosis.

What is a bright spot on MRI?

The posterior pituitary bright spot is an MRI feature of the normal pituitary gland wherein the posterior pituitary appears bright on non-contrast T1 weighted images.

Can you see calcifications on MRI?

Some radiologists call these “unidentified bright objects,” or UBOs. MRI also cannot detect calcifications (calcium deposits in breast tissue that could be a sign of cancer). Finally, MRI can dislodge certain metal devices, such as pacemakers, in some people.

What do MRI calcifications look like?

In MRI, calcification appears with various signal intensities on conventional spin echo (SE) T1 or T2 weighted images (3, 4, 5), which makes it difficult to identify definitively as calcium. In gradient-echo acquisitions, calcifications usually appear as hypointense and cannot be differentiated from hemorrhage.