Efficacy of Computed Tomography and Ultrasonography in Diagnosis of Metastatic Cervical Lymph Nodes in Orofacial Cancer

INTRODUCTION: There is no consensus on which imaging modality is better for the detection of metastatic cervical lymph nodes in orofacial malignancies. This study evaluates the efficacy of computed tomography (CT) and ultrasonography (US) in diagnosis of metastatic cervical lymph nodes in orofacial cancer. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Sixty patients with various histologically diagnosed orofacial malignant lesions and clinical evidence of cervical lymph node metastasis were examined using US and CT. Further, the affected lymph nodes were biopsied and examined histologically. The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), and accuracy of the techniques were calculated. The data was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 19 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA) and Microsoft Excel 2010 (Microsoft, Redmond, WA, USA). Test of statistical significance was set at 0.05. RESULTS: US recorded a sensitivity, specificity, PPV, NPV, and accuracy of 80.0%, 57.1%, 77.5%, 60.0%, and 71.7%, respectively (P = 0.004), while CT recorded a sensitivity, specificity, PPV, NPV, and accuracy of 87.1%, 71.4%, 85.0%, 75.0%, and 81.7%, respectively (P< 0.0001). Lymph node size was the commonest criterion in the diagnoses of metastases in cases with cervical lymph nodes. CONCLUSION: Although we obtained great results using US, our results indicated CT to be a better imaging modality for detecting metastatic cervical lymph nodes in orofacial malignancies.