Computed Tomography and Magnetic Resonance Imaging Manifestations of Adrenal Schwannoma

Abstract

Adrenal schwannoma is a type of benign rare tumor, and as such there is a relative paucity of information regarding its imaging appearance in the previous literature, which may be misdiagnosed and result in excessive surgery. In the present study, 11 patients with variable and nonspecific symptoms had undergone CT and MRI examinations and were pathologically proven adrenal schwannomas. All cases were retrospectively collected to investigate the imaging manifestations. The tumors displayed unilateral in different sizes, which were well-defined, encapsuled, rounded or oval, solid or cystic-solid masses with or without calcification on unenhanced CT images. On unenhanced MRI images, tumors exhibited homogeneous isointense or heterogeneous hypointense signal on T1-weighted images and hyperintense signal on T2-weighted images. All masses on the enhanced images of both CT and MRI demonstrated heterogeneous progressive enhancement pattern. These results suggested that the combination of a variety of imaging characteristics could more sufficiently improve on diagnosis accuracy of adrenal schwannoma and provide significant information for clinical treatment.