Ultrasonographic assessment for response to radiochemotherapy of metastatic cervical lymph nodes in head and neck cancer: Usefulness of grey-scale and color Doppler sonography

To predict the response of lymph node metastasis to preoperative radiochemo therapy sonographically, the correlation between ultrasonographs and histol ogic features was retrospectively examined in 43 metastatic cervical lymph nodes from 24 patients with squamous cell carcinoma in the oral and maxillo facial region. Ultrasonographs were compared among poor-, good-, and comple te-response lymph nodes. Before radiochemotherapy, hypoechoic internal echo and intranodal blood perfusion demonstrated many complete-response nodes; in contrast, most poor-response nodes showed peripheral blood perfusion and an avascular pattern, but did not have specific internal echo intensity. C omplete-response nodes showed a significant reduction in their maximum and minimum diameters after radiochemotherapy. These results indicate that ultr asonography is useful for predicting the response of cervical lymph node me tastasis to radiochemotherapy, (C) 2000 World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine & Biology.