MRI is a non-invasive imaging technology that shows detailed images of the body.
It scans are helpful in looking at cancers of the nasal cavities and paranasal sinuses.
It is often used for disease detection, diagnosis, and treatment monitoring.
Advantages: Non-radiation and painless, high resolution of soft tissue.
Disadvantages: Must maintain static scanning for half an hour or more, more expensive, noisy,
no metal objects in the patient’s body due to magnetic field limitations.
The PET scan is a type of nuclear medicine scanning, combining PET scanning and CT scanning technology.
It uses a mildly radioactive drug to show up areas of your body where cells are more active than normal. Advantages: It can be used for whole-body or localized scanning to detect early cancerous lesions
in the nasopharynx, whether the cancer has spread to other organs, and how far the cancer has spread.
Disadvantages: Expensive; injected with a low level of radioactive developer, not suitable for frequent use.
Inflamed or cancer cells show up as bright spots on PET scans because they
have a higher metabolic rate than do typical cells.
It cannot always distinguish between tumors and inflammation due to
similar imaging characteristics. Each time my heart sank when I saw those spots.
