Research situation of diffusion-weighted imaging in diagnosis and treatment of nasopharyngeal carcinoma

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a kind of common head and neck malignant tumors in the south of China. The main therapy is radiotherapy. It's easy to recurrent and metastasize and impacts greatly on the prognosis if no proper treatment were applied. Diffusion-weighted of MR imaging (DW-MRI) could detect tiny lesions of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) effectively, evaluate the efficiency of radiotherapy, and predict prognosis by quantitatively measuring the ADC values of lesions. In this review, DW-MRI in the diagnosis and treatment of nasopharyngeal carcinoma were summarized. (authors)