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(Stroke. 1999;30:478-479.)
© 1999 American Heart Association, Inc.

Letters to the Editor

Diffusion-Weighted MRI in Severe Leukoaraiosis

Kazunori Okada, MD; Li-Hua Wu Shotai Kobayashi, MD

Department of Internal Medicine III, Shimane Medical University, Izumo, Japan

To the Editor:

Recent articles^{1 2} have reported that diffusion-weighted MRI (DWI) is useful in both detecting very early ischemic lesions and identifying the responsible lesion in multiple subcortical lesions. Singer and colleagues¹ described the very high accuracy of DWI for their 39 subjects with acute subcortical infarction. They reported that the sensitivity of DWI for acute subcortical infarction was 94.9% and the specificity was 94.1%. But they did not refer to its relation to the periventricular hyperintensity area (PVH).

We studied 18 cases (10 men and 8 women; mean age, 72±7.9 years) with serial acute cerebral infarction. They were consisted of 3 cases with cortical infarction and 15 cases with subcortical infarctions, including infratentorial regions. MRI was performed with a 1.5-T MR scanner with hardware for echo-planar imaging (Gyroscan ACS-NT, Philips). In all cases, the images were obtained during the same imaging session and at the same slice locations; 6-mm-thick sections without gap and 240-cm field of view were used for all scans. T1-weighted spin-echo (SE) used a 256x256 matrix, TR=360 ms, TE=14 ms, number of excitations=1, and acquisition time=2:16 (min:sec). T2-weighted fast-SE used an echo train length of 11, TR=2000, TE=140, number of excitations=1, and acquisition time=4:03. Fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) imaging was obtained with a fast-SE method with an echo train length of 19, TR=5500, TE=140, number of excitations=1, and acquisition time=3:40. DWI, used in Multishot, SE/echo-planar image sequence, was performed with diffusion sensitivity b=850 s/mm², TR=857, TE=20, number of excitations=1, and acquisition time=1:36. Image analysis was . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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