Assessment of Mandibular Bone Invasion With MRI Using SWIFT

Unfortunately, detecting bone invasion and extension of bone involvement prior to surgery is often difficult with the currently available imaging techniques. MRI with high contrast resolution and the ability to perform multiplanar imaging plays an integral role in the delineation of tumoral involvement of the bone. Although MRI is an excellent tool in the assessment of bone invasion in carcinoma, its overestimation of cortical invasion and tumor extent to the bone marrow have been a diagnostic challenge, leading to false positive results. Like many of the musculoskeletal system tissues, cortical bone produces no signal with conventional MRI techniques, limiting the characterization of image contrast and differentiation of adjacent soft tissues. A novel MRI technique called Sweep Imaging with Fourier Transformation (SWIFT) appears to be a suitable tool to overcome this challenge. The main advantage of SWIFT is to obtain signal from the cortical bone. We believe that the SWIFT technique will overcome the false positive results.

Patients enrolled in this study will be asked to come to the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research (CMRR) at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota for a scheduled MRI. Brief scans will be obtained (less than 1 minute) to localize the area of interest. Longer MRI scans (around 5-15 minutes each) will then be obtained. The total time required for scanning will be about 1 hour.

To determine how well our MR images will predict the presence of mandibular invasion, we will compare our results with clinical, operative, radiological and pathological findings. Thus, patients will be asked to give permission to the investigators to access the relevant medical records.