Multimodal magnetic resonance imaging for the diagnosis of parotid gland malignancies: systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: To systematically evaluate the qualitative diagnostic value of multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for parotid gland tumors. However, there is still a lot of controversy in this area, and the results of different studies are not consistent. Therefore, it is necessary to use meta method to analyze the significance of multimodal MRI in the diagnosis of parotid gland tumors. METHODS: This study aimed to assess the diagnostic performance of multimodal MRI for parotid gland malignancies. We performed a search in the databases of the Cochrane Library, PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, Chinese BioMedical Literature (CBM). Quality evaluation and data extraction were performed for the included articles, and meta-analysis was performed on the included studies using Stata 15.0 software. RESULTS: After screening, a total of 5 relevant documents met the standards and were included. The results of analysis showed that the MRI with diffusion-weighted imaging (MRI-DWI) combined sensitivity and specificity were 0.54 (0.22–0.83) and 0.93 (0.79–0.98). The MRI with dynamic contrast-enhanced (MRI-DCE) combined sensitivity and specificity were 0.81 (0.48–0.95) and 0.95 (0.92–0.97). The pooled area under the curve (AUC) of the MRI-DWI was 0.89 (95% CI: 0.86–0.91) and the pooled area under the curve (AUC) of the MRI-DCE was 0.96 (95% CI: 0.94–0.97). DISCUSSION: The results of meta-analysis showed that multimodal MRI had good sensitivity, specificity and high sensitivity in the diagnosis of parotid gland carcinoma. However, there is high heterogeneity, which needs to be verified by a large number of clinical studies.