Urinary Bladder Cancer: The Current and Potential Role of MR Imaging in Non-Distant Metastatic Lesions

Urinary bladder cancer is the second most common genitourinary malignancy in Westernized countries. A number of emerging imaging techniques have recently been reported in the literature for use in imaging bladder cancer. While the explicit application of MR imaging in bladder cancer especially in non-distant bladder cancer or bladder cancer localized in pelvic remains uncertain and awaits a thorough evaluation. Therefore, this article aims to make a systematic review of previous literature and provide a complete assessment of the value of MR as an evolving imaging tool in localized urinary bladder cancer application. Studies were conducted by searching the MEDLINE and PubMed databases up to 2012 using both medical subject heading (Mesh) and a free text method like “urinary bladder cancer”, “magnetic resonance imaging” or “MRI”, “diffusion weighted imaging” or “DWI”. About 53 articles were selected and analyzed which were considered to be associated with the objective of this systematic review (Table 1). Results showed that MRI especially the newer functional imaging technique like DWI may has a great potential role in localized bladder cancer like early detection, staging, evaluation of tumor aggressiveness and therapeutic responsiveness of patients in the assessment of urinary bladder cancer and so forth. Newer MRI has already proceeded promising results in bladder cancer application; and the explicit role of newer MRI in bladder cancer patients still needs further research and awaits to be thoroughly evaluated.