Pathological diagnosis of brain tumors provides an index of brain disease severity and guides clinical practice in their treatment. Diagnoses are often made from biopsy material obtained using stereotactic techniques with the difficulty of making a histological diagnosis in small samples. In our experience, the estimation of the degree of malignancy on the basis of in vitro 1H magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H MRS) appears to well correlate with histology and clinical evolution. We report two cases with a discordance between the diagnoses on the basis of histology examination and in vitro 1H MRS whose evolution seems to correlate better with the data of 1H MRS.
Copyright 2005 S. Karger AG, Basel.