Abstract
Introduction
We hypothesize that surgical decompression for Chiari malformation type 1 (CM-1) is associated with statistically significant decrease in tonsillar pulsatility and that the degree of pulsatility can be reliably assessed regardless of the experience level of the reader.
Methods
An Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-compliant retrospective study was performed on 22 children with CM-1 (8 males; mean age 11.4 years) who had cardiac-gated true-FISP sequence and phase-contrast cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flow imaging as parts of routine magnetic resonance (MR) imaging before and after surgical decompression. The surgical technique (decompression with or without duraplasty) was recorded for each patient. Three independent radiologists with different experience levels assessed tonsillar pulsatility qualitatively and quantitatively and assessed peritonsillar CSF flow qualitatively. Results were analyzed. To evaluate reliability, Fleiss kappa for multiple raters on categorical variables and intra-class correlation for agreement in pulsatility ratings were calculated.
Results
After surgical decompression, the degree of tonsillar pulsatility appreciably decreased, confirmed by t test, both qualitatively (p values <0.001, <0.001, and 0.045 for three readers) and quantitatively (amount of decrease/p value for three readers 0.7 mm/<0.001, 0.7 mm/<0.001, and 0.5 mm/0.022). There was a better agreement among the readers in quantitative assessment of tonsillar pulsatility (kappa 0.753–0.834), compared to qualitative assessment of pulsatility (kappa 0.472–0.496) and qualitative assessment of flow (kappa 0.056 to 0.203). Posterior fossa decompression with duraplasty led to a larger decrease in tonsillar pulsatility, compared to posterior fossa decompression alone.
Conclusion
Tonsillar pulsatility in CM-1 is significantly reduced after surgical decompression. Quantitative assessment of tonsillar pulsatility was more reliable across readers than qualitative assessments of tonsillar pulsatility or CSF flow.
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Acknowledgments
This study was supported by the Washington University Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences grants UL1 TR000448 and TL1 TR000449 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH. This study was also supported in part through philanthropic funding provided by the Park-Reeves Syringomyelia Research Consortium, the O’Keefe family, and Mateo Dalla Fontana. The authors would like to thank Michael Wallendorf from the Department of Biostatistics at the Washington University in St. Louis for his significant contributions to this manuscript.
Ethical standards and patient consent
We declare that all human and animal studies have been approved by the Institutional Review Board and have therefore been performed in accordance with the ethical standards laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments. We declare that IRB no. 201102012 waived informed consent for this retrospective study.
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We declare that we have no conflict of interest.
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Radmanesh, A., Greenberg, J.K., Chatterjee, A. et al. Tonsillar pulsatility before and after surgical decompression for children with Chiari malformation type 1: an application for true fast imaging with steady state precession. Neuroradiology 57, 387–393 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00234-014-1481-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00234-014-1481-5