[Preliminary application of amide proton transfer-MRI in diagnosis of salivary gland tumors].

Magnetic resonance imaging is most frequently used for pre-surgical diagnosis and follow-up in salivary gland neoplasms. As for traditional techniques, dynamic contrast-enhanced and diffusion-weighted imaging are two magnetic resonance sequences commonly used in clinic, in spite of their relatively lower sensitivity and specificity. Recently, a novel magnetic resonance technique, amide proton transfer-MRI (APT-MRI), gets a lot of attention due to its special imaging principle and higher sensitivity and specificity for many human tumors diagnosis. Moreover, some studies applied this new MRI technique successfully to the diagnosis and differential diagnosis of salivary gland neoplasms. In this review, we are going to focus on the basic principle of APT-MRI and its clinical applications in salivary gland neoplasms, with a comparison of traditional MRI sequences. We will also give some prospects based on these preliminary applications in APT-MRI diagnosis for salivary gland neoplasms.