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.