Abstract
A retrospective investigation was performed in 174 patients with major salivary gland tumors who had undergone surgery at our department between 2002 and 2011. The patients consisted of 143 with parotid gland tumors, 30 with submandibular gland tumors, and 1 with a sublingual gland tumor. The percentage of malignant tumors among the submandibular gland tumors was 36.7%, which was higher than that among the parotid gland tumors (21.0%). Fine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) was the most commonly used modality for the preoperative diagnosis of malignancy. In this series, the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of FNAC for the detection of malignant tumors were 90.6%, 93.5%, and 92.8%, respectively. Retrospectively, the accuracy of FNAC for diagnosis of the histologic tumor type was 64.0%. Those results suggest that ultrasound-guided FNAC is useful for preoperative diagnosis of salivary gland tumors.
