Magnetic resonance imaging of the liver and spleen in the diagnosis of storage diseases
Storage diseases (thesaurismoses, storage reticuloses) are the common name of a large group of hyperplastic non-leukemic diseases characterized by congenital or acquired metabolic distur­bances and abnormal accumulation of metabolic products in blood and/or cells of different organs and by hyperplasia of mononu-clear phagocyte elements in the liver, spleen, bone marrow, lymph nodes, and other organs, which makes the diseases systemic. Among the imaging techniques for diffuse liver diseases, ultra-sonography and X-ray computed tomography are most commonly used for their diagnosis and follow-up. Magnetic resonance imag­ing (MRI) has the highest sensitivity and specificity in diagnosing liver diseases. The paper considers the current MRI procedures that are used to diagnose storage diseases and to quantify found changes. For Gaucher''s disease, the potentials of novel tech­niques, such as MR spectroscopy, diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), and chemical shift imaging (Dickson''s method) for the estimation of revealed changes, are described. For hemochro-matosis, the contribution of T2 WI to the quantification of iron overload in the liver parenchyma is depicted, which is an alterna­tive invasive procedure in its determination. Incorporation of MRI into the exami­ nation algorithm for patients with stor­age diseases will be able to improve the detection of these rare diseases and to mon­itor the efficiency of performed therapy.