Magnetic resonance imaging in the assessment of hip arthroplasty complications.

Abstract

Radiol Bras. 2015 Set/Out;48(5):VII Hip arthroplasty represents one of the greatest technological developments of the modern medicine that is beneficial to a wide range of patients. However, like every surgery, it is subjected to a series of complications, some of them easily and other not so easily recognizable, as in the case of inflammatory pseudotumor. Pseudotumors may be found in cases of well-functioning hip prostheses as well as in painful hips, and for this reason a clinical evaluation associated with a correct diagnosis are essential both for the prognosis and for the definition of the therapeutic approach to the patients, since the presence of a periprosthetic cystic collection is not necessarily connected with a revision of the prosthesis. In such cases, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has shown to be effective and accurate principally in the assessment of soft parts. However, after reading the review article published by Vilas Boas et al. in the present issue of Radiologia Brasileira, one can notice that this diagnosis practically represents a challenge to this clinical specialty. Firstly, the presence of magnetic susceptibility artifacts caused by the prostheses generates great image distortion which limits the appropriate visualization and, consequently, makes the diagnosis more difficult. Despite the availability of innumerable techniques and sequences to reduce such artifacts, varying according the equipment, many times they determine loss of images resolution.