Purpose: Evaluation of frequency-selective fat saturation (FS) and Short-Tau-Inversion-Recovery (STIR) fat suppression (FU) in MRI of patients with malignant tumours of the oral cavity or oropharynx.
Methods: Twenty patients with biopsy-proven squamous cell carcinoma of the oral cavity or oropharynx were examined by MRI at 1.0 T. A T2-weighted TSE-sequence with and without STIR-FU and a T1-weighted SE-sequence with and without FS were compared in axial slices.
Results: STIR-FU was successful in all and FS in 29/33 (87.9%) of the examinations. When visualisation and delineation of tumours were ranked on a four-point scale (0-3), respective mean values for images without/with FU or FS of 1.9 and 2.6 for T2-TSE, 1.4 and 1.3 for T1-SE without contrast media administration (CM) and 2.0 and 2.5 with CM were found. Signal/noise-ratios were inferior with FU and FS, but the tumour/muscle intensity ratio in CM-T1-SE improved with FS.
Conclusions: STIR-T2-TSE and FS-T1-SE with CM were most useful for MRI of carcinomas of the oral cavity and oropharynx.