More articles from Adult Brain

Patients with suspected idiopathic normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH) on the basis of the ventriculomegaly and a triad of symptoms underwent the CSF tap test. CSF volumes were extracted from a T2-weighted 3D spin-echo SPACE sequence on 3T MR imaging and were quantified semiautomatically. Twenty-four patients with tap-positive idiopathic NPH, 25 patients without response to the tap test, and 23 age-matched controls were included. The CSF volume of the parietal convexity had the highest area under the ROC curve in the discrimination of the tap-test response (0.768), followed by the z-Evans Index (0.758), and the upper-to-lower subarachnoid space ratio index (0.723). CSF volume of the parietal convexity of less than 38 mL, upper-to-lower subarachnoid space ratio of less than 0.33, and a z-Evans Index of greater than 0.42 are the newly proposed useful indices for idiopathic NPH diagnosis.