Abstract

In patients with head and neck cancers (HNC) flourine-18 (F18) fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography/magnetic resonance imaging (PET/MRI) imaging shows a similar performance to PET/computed tomography (CT) in terms of image and fusion quality, lesion prominence, anatomic localization, and number of detected lesions. Although studies investigating the accuracy of PET/MRI in tumor and node staging give conflicting results, there is a prediction that it may provide a better evaluation of locoregional spread compared to PET/CT. However, since most studies include small patient groups, studies with larger patient groups are needed to definitively determine the clinical role of PET/MRI imaging. FDG PET/MRI imaging combined with diffusion-weighted imaging provides excellent results for detecting residual/recurrent disease after radiotherapy. PET/MRI has excellent and similar diagnostic performance to PET/CT in detecting distant metastases and distant second primary cancer in HNC patients.