Skip to main content
  • Oral presentation
  • Open access
  • Published:

Salivary glands and lymph nodes

Involvement of lymph nodes in various pathologies of the head and neck is frequent not only in malignant diseases but also in inflammatory conditions. As size criteria are not sufficient to define a lymph node as malignant, other criteria such as shape, central necrosis and extracapsular spread are other helpful signs. However, micrometastases are still an unresolved problem although new imaging methods have already shown promising results. Typical imaging features of CT and MRI indicating extracapsular spread and carotid artery invasion will be discussed as these have therapeutic and prognostic implications.

Although salivary gland pathologies are relatively rare, its large variety of differential diagnoses makes it challenging. In children and pregnant women, sonography is the first step, and CT is the method of choice in inflammatory disease. MRI is the first line examination in palpable salivary gland masses to assess the exact extent of tumours, the invasion of neighbouring structures, perineural spread and bone invasion. Differential diagnoses and imaging features of the most frequent tumour types will be discussed and an approach to differentiate between benign and malignant lesions will be provided.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Thoeny, H.C. Salivary glands and lymph nodes. Cancer Imaging 15 (Suppl 1), O25 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/1470-7330-15-S1-O25

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1470-7330-15-S1-O25

Keywords