Nuclear magnetic resonance tomographic imaging in liver disease.

The non-invasive diagnostic technique of whole-body nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging was evaluated in 30 patients with established liver disease and 20 patients without liver disease. Comparison with diagnostic ultrasound and radionuclide liver scan shows that NMR easily differentiates malignant tumours from benign cystic lesions and provides useful information in patients with cirrhosis and metastatic deposits. In the demonstration of space-occupying lesions in the liver, NMR is as sensitive as ultrasound and more so than radionuclide liver scans when the metastases are less than 1.5 cm in diameter. In the demonstration of cirrhosis it is more sensitive than both ultrasound and radionuclide liver scan. The specificity of NMR is superior to both ultrasound and radionuclide liver scan, both of which only demonstrate the presence of lesions, whereas NMR tomographic imaging based on the proton spin-lattice time (T1) of tissue accurately indicates the nature of the lesion.