I have to go for a third mri to get differnt angles. what does that mean? i had an mri of my neck and they found a blood vessle tumor in my thorasic spine. doc ordered a second one. i was hoping they would find nothing. yesterday i got a call the radiol

From : From what i understand of your question, you are being asked to come back for "more views" on an MRI that you recently had. While this is not common, it is not unheard of. When a patient gets an MRI ordered, the radiologist looks over the request from your doctor and "protocols" the examination. This means that the he puts together a list of "sequences" (each time you heard the magnet making loud noise was a sequence) that he thinks will best show what the ordering doctor is looking for. We do this based on our knowledge and experience but sometimes we don't pick all of the sequences or views that turn out to be needed. Sometimes something is found that we didn't anticipate and therefore hadn't looked for. In these instances we would ask that the patient return for more imaging to target whatever finding we wanted better images of. For a vascular tumor of the spine you might need to come back and have the study with contrast to make the vessels stand out better (gadolinium) or you might need to have the study done in a 3d technique to help figure out where vessels come from and go. I would ask the radiologist what extra is needed and why so that you understand what they are looking for and what they are going to do. If the radiologist is uncomfortable answering this (he may not yet have enough information) you should check with your referring doctor to explain the additional views.

Most likely MRI of : Neck or cervical spine picked up a part of your upper thoracic spine that revealed a possible abnormal condition so a dedicated MRI of thoracic spine ordered maybe with and without contrast with the most common blood vessel tumor being a hemangioma which is found in 11% of spines and is a benign tumor and rarely causes any problems.