Malignant Paraganglioma of Urinary Bladder: A Case Report CHAO-JUNG WEI CHIA-YUEN CHEN JIA-HWAI WANG CHIN-CHEN PAN CHUI-MEI TIU

Malignant paraganglioma of the urinary bladder is a rare tumor. Clinical diagnosis of this tumor relies on high index of suspicion and high levels of blood and urine catecholamines. The malignancy of the paraganglioma is established upon the presence of local aggressive behavior or distant metastasis. Imaging studies play an important role in detecting tumor foci, in determining the extent of the tumor invasion as well as in pre-surgical evaluation. We have presented the CT and MR imaging features of a case of malignant paraganglioma of the urinary bladder. The tumor demonstrated high signal intensity on both T1-weighted images and T2-weighted images and being enhanced by MRI contrast medium. MR imaging is superior to CT in delineating the extent of the tumor invasion into the bladder wall because of its better tissue contrast and multiplanar imaging capability.