MRI — The Investigation of Choice in Syringomyelia?

Abstract

During a 12 month period of operation of a 0.3 Tesla MRI iron cored resistive scanner 74 cases of syr‐ingomyelia were diagnosed on clinical, radiological and/or surgical grounds. Without knowledge of any clinical or radiological data the syrinxes were classified into five groups — idiopathic, idiopathic associated with Chiari malformation, tumour associated, post‐traumatic and arachnoiditis associated — and the lesion characteristics within each group were compared. Although MRI was extremely sensitive in picking up even small syrinxes, there was considerable overlap of MRI characteristics across the sub‐groups, so that two post‐traumatic syrinxes had lesion characteristics identifiable with..