MR Arthrography and Arthroscopic Correlation in the Evaluation of Shoulder Pathologies

Abstract

Background: Shoulder is a complex joint. Shoulder patologies effect young and active people. It causes to loss of manpower and it is common situation. It is important to accurately determine the etiological causes in patients presenting with pain and recurrent shoulder dislocation.

Aim: The aim of the study to evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of conventional magnetic resonance (MR) imaging and MR arthrography in the diagnosis of shoulder pathologies, and to compare with arthroscopic results.

Methods: Twenty-five patients (16 male and nine female) who were refered because of clinically suspected shoulder pathologies were examined using conventional MR imaging and MR arthrography. In 21 of these patients, imaging findings were compared with those at arthroscopy, which performed by an experienced orthopedic surgeon.

Results: In 21 patients there were 30 pathologic shoulder lesions on arthroscopy. Conventional MR imaging detected 26 of them (%86.6sensitivity), whereas 29 lesions were detected by MR arthrograpy (% 96.6sensitivity).

Conclusions: MR arthrography is a more sensitive and specific modality than conventional MR imaging to evaluate of shoulder pathologies. Our sensitivity and specificity values obtained with both conventional MR and MR arthrography were found to be similar to the results of studies with larger patient groups. No statistically significant difference was found between the
imaging methods used in our study(p>0,05). But it was seen that the results obtained by MR arthrography were closer to the results obtained arthroscopically. In fact, It was concluded that MR arthrography is a reliable imaging method to be designed for accurate and detailed evaluation of shoulder pathologies.