Cervical Stenosis

This is a common diagnosis in my MRI or probably just about every MRI department. Stenosis means narrowing in medical terminology, so the term cervical stenosis means just that; narrowing of the cervical stenosis. To adequately demonstrate this it is good to see not only in a sagittal plane but the axial plane. This was a patient who previously had surgery for this problem and now has it on several levels. This was a t2 weighted image in the sagittal plane and notice the compression on the spinal cord.

Vertebral Dissection

We had done a young male for stroke like symptoms a while back and he was diagnosed with a vertebral dissection. He was also found to have a few acute ischemic areas in posterior part of the brain on diffusion. Well he seemed to be better when we just followed up on him and did a MRA on his neck. I remembered this case because he was so young and they suspected a neck munipulation from a chiropractor caused it. He was found to still have occluded bilateral vertebrals. It looks like he was lucky and superiorly in the cow portion he was feeding the posterior circulation from the anterior circulation.

SOFT TISSUE NECK IN MR

My MRI department does perform soft tissue exams from time to time, but I have not seen one in a while. I presume a lot of those exams are going to CT. I did perform a MRI procedure recently for a patient with unexplained pain just inferior to mandible. The exam did not demonstrate any pathology which would explain these symptoms but did find an incidental finding of a thyroglossal duct cyst. To be honest I was not sure what this was other than a structure filled with fluid. So I did a quick google search and found some useful information on a website from the University of Virginia Health System http://www.healthsystemvirginia.edu/. It turns out these cysts are formed in embryonic development after the thyroid is developed. They can often enlarge and be painful after certain infections such as respiratory. I like how MR images demonstrate these cysts. Because of the high water content it is very bright on this t2 axial with fat suppression and it showed some enhancement post contrast on a t1 axial image also with fat suppression.