References & Resources

Brain Abscess

Clinical Pearls

Evaluation

Important:

- neuroimaging is the cornerstone of diagnosis
- false-negative rate of 6%
- preferential location: frontal and temporal lobes

DWI superior to CT or conventional MRI in differentiating abscess from other lesions
- esp solitary tumours
- hyper intense on DWI and hypo intense on apparent diffusion coefficient images
- sens and spec of 96% (Xu, Clin Rad 2013)