Purpose or Case Report: We reviewed the MR imaging of all the paediatric patients with optic nerve glioma in our department over the last 15 years in order to determine the frequency of MR Imaging and surveillance which puts significant burden on our imaging department where MRI access is limited especially under general anaesthesia.

Methods & Materials: We reviewed all the MR Imaging that the patients had over the 15 years. We tried to establish the gender of the patients, how many MR Imaging was performed with and without general anaesthesia/sedation, the mean number of MRI performed per patient, enhancement pattern of the tumour at initial presentation etc.
Results: Forty patients had MR Imaging over the last 15 years,15 of whom were male and 25 were female. The youngest patient at first imaging presentation was 0.3 years and the oldest was11.4 years. A total of 332 MRI were performed over 15 years. Of these, 213 required general anesthesia, 30 sedation and 89 none. Seventeen patients (42.5%) demonstrated contrast enhancement of their tumour at initial presentation while 23 (57.5%) did not.

Conclusions: While we know that optic nerve glioma is an indolent tumour and may require frequent surveillance over time, we found out that a subgroup of these patients, may not need to have routine surveillance imaging if their clinical status has not changed. The initial imaging characteristic of the tumour and ongoing clinical symptoms may be the two main determinants for further imaging. We have not seen this documented before and we believe this will have significant implications on resource limited radiology departments.