Ethical considerations
Legal representative of all patients gave their informed consent.
All temporal bone MRI with DWI sequences performed in our pediatric university hospital between 2005 and 2015 were included retrospectively. All patients with a cholesteatoma diagnosis on the MRI report and who underwent surgery were included. All scans have been analyzed by a pediatric ENT specialized radiologist (MEB). For each patient, intraoperative findings and histological findings on the surgical report and on the pathological report were collected. The PPV was established. False positives were analyzed and compared to true positives. The chi‐square test was used to compare binary qualitative variables, and the Student test was used to compare continuous quantitative variables. An α risk <0.05 was tolerated. Statistical analysis was performed on R software.
Imaging technique: all examinations were carried out on a 1.5T MRI scanner (INTERA; Philips Medical Systems; Best, The Netherland) using a head coil or a paired surface coil. All DW-MRI included a coronal T2 turbo-spin echo (TSE) sequence with 2 mm thick slices, an axial 3D T2 TSE high resolution sequence (DRIVE), an axial T1 TSE sequence 2 mm-thick slices sequence and two DWI sequences axial and coronal. DWI sequences were DWI-TSE sequences, and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) maps were calculated.