Does magnetic resonance imaging provide additional anatomic information compared to echocardiography in patients with intracardiac tumors?
MR imaging provides valuable additional anatomic information for evaluating intracardiac tumors initially diagnosed by echocardiography, aiding in surgical planning and biopsy decisions.
MAgnetic resonance (MR) imaging was performed in 14 patients with intracavitary cardiac tumors diagnosed by echocardiography. Except in the patients whose echocardiograms were diagnostic of atrial myxomas, this modality contributed important additional anatomic information regarding the tumor's relationship to the normal intracardiac structures and/or its extension to the adjacent vascular and mediastinal structures. The MR findings correlated extremely well with the findings in all 12 patients who underwent surgical exploration or postmortem examination, and in the other two patients, MR guided the decision to obtain transvenous biopsy samples of their right heart masses.
Freedberg et al. (Fri,) studied this question.