MRI susceptibility artifact due to orthodontic appliance

Case contributed by Hazem M Almasarei
Diagnosis certain

Presentation

Headache

Patient Data

Age: 30 years
Gender: Male

Orthodontic appliance.

Incidental note of deviated nasal septum to the right.

There is a large MRI susceptibility artifact due to orthodontic appliance causing distortion of the images and most of the anterior facial structures are obscured.

There is an almost symmetrical hyperintense signal inferior to the frontal lobes bilaterally on T2-weighted images and FLAIR sequences, which is highly suggestive of an artifact.

Crescentic moon appearance: Partial obscuring both eyes, due to metallic susceptibility MRI artifact.

Case Discussion

Susceptibility artifact is one of the most important MRI artifacts, which occurs when structures with markedly different magnetic susceptibilities lie adjacent to each other (e.g. metallic foreign body-biological tissue, air-tissue and air-bone interfaces), resulting in geometric distortion with very dark and very bright signal areas, which make these regions virtually uninterpretable.

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