Purpose: To evaluate the effectiveness of three fat measurement methods for parotid glands in healthy subjects, with or without metallic dental implants.
Materials and methods: The institutional review board approved this study, with informed consent obtained from 114 volunteers undergoing magnetic resonance (MR) imaging at 1.5 T. Fat-saturated (FS) and non-fat-saturated (NFS) fast spin-echo T1-weighted imaging (T1 method), FS and NFS T2-weighted periodically rotated overlapping parallel lines with enhanced reconstruction fast spin-echo imaging (T2 method), and gradient-echo imaging with fat-water separation using iterative decomposition with echo asymmetry and least squares (IDEAL) method were used to derive parotid fat contents. Two raters examined the homogeneity of fat saturation to determine whether parotid fat quantification was successful, with the success rate in the 114 subjects recorded for each protocol. In subjects whose fat quantification was successful with all three imaging methods, linear regression was used to analyze the correlation between any pair of the three parotid fat content measurement methods.
Results: Success rates in parotid fat measurements by using T1, T2, and IDEAL methods were 87.7% (100 of 114), 87.7% (100 of 114), and 100% (114 of 114), respectively. The means of measured parotid fat contents revealed significant differences (P < .001) between any pair of the three measurement methods. The parotid fat contents measured with the three methods were significantly correlated with each other between any pair of combinations.
Conclusion: The IDEAL method provided a high success rate for parotid fat measurements, even in subjects with metallic dental implants.