Current status of diffusion-weighted imaging in differentiating parotid tumors

Recently, diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is an essential magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) protocol for head and neck imaging in clinical practice as it plays an important role in lesion detection, tumor extension evaluation, differential diagnosis, therapeutic effect prediction, therapy evaluation, and recurrence diagnosis. Especially in the parotid gland, several studies have already attempted to achieve accurate differentiation between benign and malignant tumors using DWI. A conventional single-shot echo-planar-based DWI is widely used for head and neck imaging, whereas advanced DWI sequences, such as intravoxel incoherent motion, diffusion kurtosis imaging, periodically rotated overlapping parallel lines with enhanced reconstruction, and readout-segmented echo-planar imaging (readout segmentation of long variable echo-trains), have been used to characterize parotid tumors.

Source: Auris, Nasus, Larynx - July 22, 2022 Category: ENT & OMF Authors: Hiroki Kato, Masaya Kawaguchi, Tomohiro Ando, Hirofumi Shibata, Takenori Ogawa, Yoshifumi Noda, Fuminori Hyodo, Masayuki Matsuo Source Type: research