[Fundamental study of the detection of metastatic bone tumors with whole-body MR imaging].

Preliminary studies were performed to evaluate the usefulness of whole-body magnetic resonance imaging (WB-MRI) in the screening of bone metastases. The fast short TI inversion recovery sequence was the most suitable method because of its minimal image distortion and uniformity of fat suppression in a large field of view. In 4 cases of malignant tumor, the localization of all 8 bone metastases detected with bone scintigraphy (BS) could be clarified with WB-MRI. Furthermore, WB-MRI with fast STIR alone could depict 4 lesions undetected by BS, and WB-MRI combined with contrast enhancement could depict 5 such lesions.