negative mri

Is it possible that a neurologist (ms specialist) sees lesions on a brain and cervical mri while the radiologist did not?

[Lulu54]

Hi Sarita and welcome to the MS forum.  It is quite possible that the MS neuro sees more on our MRI's than the radiologist for a couple reasons -

the 1st is experience - the MS neuro is trained specifically to see lesions, the radiologist is trained to recognize abnormalities but not necessarily a specialty like MS

The 2nd is radiologist do the minimum amount of reading MRI's required and then pass the test images on to the referring doctor.  My most recent radiology report on my brain and cervical spine said basically nothing... a sentence on each and that was it.  I asked my MS neuro about it's brevity and he laughed and said the radiologists write just enough so they can bill my insurance company, and not a word more.  Now I don't know if that is exactly the truth, but they sure had nothing to say about my brain and it was the first time I had been imaged there.  I have multiple lesions, black holes and all sorts of other things that the radiologist could have mentioned but didn't.

Hope that helps,
Lulu

[sarita455]

Thank you so much for answering. I just received the mri reports and they were negative.
My appointment is next week with the neuro, so I guess I need to wait and see. Hope you are ok and it is a great help to get responses from others that might be going through something similar.

[shoshin]

This happened to me. The radiologist read the brain MRI I had when I was getting diagnosed as normal, but the neuro (not an MS neuro; at the time I thought I had something else) said there were a couple small spots. When the MS neuro looked at it, he said the radiologist must've been blind.

On the other hand, before he got the report (there was a delay), the neuro thought the lesions on my spine were possibly artifacts (technical glitches in the picture), but when the radiologist said they were real, the neuro said the radiologist wouldn't have said that unless he was sure and seemed to trust the (different) radiologist's judgment.

So I guess it depends. Probably the best thing is to have a lot of eyes on the MRIs and a good neuro will look at the images and not just take the radiologist's word for things.

Good luck with your appt.

sho