Susceptibility-weighted imaging to visualize blood products and improve tumor contrast in the study of brain masses.

Purpose: To evaluate the diagnostic value of susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI) for studying brain masses.

Materials And Methods: SWI is a high-resolution, three-dimensional, fully velocity-compensated gradient-echo sequence that uses both magnitude and phase data. Custom postprocessing is applied to enhance the contrast in the magnitude images between tissues with different susceptibilities.