Subjects
This prospective clinical studyincluded 22 patients (48±13 years old) with unilateral vertigo and sensorineural hearing loss, who visited our outpatient department from July 2018 to June 2019. All patients gave written consent. The inclusion criteria were defined as follows: patients with unilateralvertigo and sensorineural hearing loss, and an age above 18 years.The exclusion criteria werealso applied including: (1) physical trauma or head and neck neoplasm, brainstem disease.(2) history of chronic inflammatory or suppurative ear disease, prior ear surgery of any kind. (3) serious psychiatric disease, haematological disease, prior treatment with chemotherapy agents or other immunosuppressive drugs. (4) MR-related contraindications, a history of allergies to GBCM and an inability to provide informed consent, as well as middle ear pathology that could impede local contrast uptake. All patients underwentdouble-dose intravenous injection of ionic gadobenatedimeglumine (Gd-BOPTA; MultiHance, Bracco Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., Shanghai, China,0.4mL/kg).
For each patient, 3D-FLAIR images were acquired four, six and eight hours after the agent injection. An extra image acquisition was implemented for eleven patients of them at 10 hours after agent injection. No patients were excluded from the study due to insufficient image quality.
MR experiments
All experiments were performed on a 3T clinical scanner (Discovery 750w, GE Healthcare, USA) equipped with an 8-channel phased-array coil. A 3D-FLAIR sequence was employed for labyrinthineimaging with scan parameters of repetition time=9000ms; echo time=aximum(128ms-132ms); inversion time=2500ms; echotrainlength=140; bandwidth=36Khz; matrix size=256×256; NEX=2; slice thickness=1.6mm, and fieldofview=21cm×16cm. The scan time was 5 minutes 46 seconds.