A Comparative Study of CT Scan and MRI in The Assessment of Squamous Cell Carcinoma of The Oral Cavity and Its Cervical Lymph Node Metastasis

Introduction: Squamous Cell Carcinoma (SCC) is the most common head and neck malignancy. To decrease the side effects of treatment and mortality from disease relapse, careful staging for the proper treatment plan is necessary. The main purpose of this prospective study is to compare the diagnostic value of Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Im-aging (MRI) in oral SCC and its lymph node me-tastasis in order to represent the proper treat-ment plan. Materials and Methods: 30 patients (19 men and 11 women) with oral SCC underwent CT and MRI before surgery. Imaging modalities of each study were evaluated individually for tu-mor size, bone invasion, muscle infiltration. These evaluations were done by two radiolo-gists and an oral-maxillofacial surgeon and veri-fied with histopathology findings as gold stand-ard. The results of the radiological assessment were correlated with the intraoperative and histopathological findings in all patients. Results: CT and MRI have equal potential for detecting the tumor size, perineural invasion and nodal metastasis. The sensitivity and spe-cificity were 50%, 90% for CT in the detection of bone invasion and 90%, 85% for MRI. The sensi-tivity and specificity were 66.66%, 90.47% for CT in detection of muscle infiltration and 55.55%, 90.47% for MRI.  Conclusion: The comparison of these modalities showed no statistically significant difference between CT and MRI. Regarding bone infiltra-tion the sensitivity of CT scan was higher than of MRI, but regarding muscle invasion the spe-cificity of MRI was higher than of CT scan.