MRI Findings of Brain Metastases in Lung Cancers

Abstract

Brain metastasis is a serious clinical problem in patients with lung cancers and a particular factor affecting the mortality and morbidity. The presence of brain metastasis and the number of the metastatic focusi are important for the treatment decision. In this study we aimed to analyze the brain metastases due to lung cancers retrospectively. The study involved 103 patients who had brain metastases. The patients were evaluated in terms of localizations of the brain metastases, histopathologic types, lesion characteristics and solidarity or multiplicity. In all of the cases, the most frequent metastases were to frontal lobe (38,5%). In SCLC and NSCLC, frontal lobe was the most frequent metastatic localization. In all the metastatic focusi, 46.6% of multiple and 53.4% of solid brain metastases were present. The multiple metastasis rate detected in SCLC’s was 82.3% and was the greatest in all the cases. The squamous cell cancers had 67.5% solid metastasis and this rate was the highest among all the types. Also, our study showed that brain metastasis of lung cancer cases had solid characteristics of 59.3%, the 38.3% included cystic component and 6.1% had hemorrhagic characteristics. In epidermoid carcinomas, cystic metastases were the most to be detected and the rate was 69.7%. In the hemorrhagic metastatic types, adenocarcinomas had the highest rate with 10.7%. In conclusion, we suppose that in lung cancers, the properties of the brain metastases will offer a positive prediction for the method prior to the treatment. However, since the metastases from the epidermoid lung cancers are frequently located in frontal lobe and mostly as single lesions, we predict that these would benefit more from the treatment.